Leonard Henry Caleb (L.H.C).Tippett d #OTD 1985 (b 8 May 1902) ASA Fellow 1950, Guy Silver Medal, President RSS 1965, Shewhart Medal. A father of statistical operations research, he invented the random number table 1927 & developed extreme value theory with Fisher and Emil Gumbel 1/3

George Dantzig b #OTD 1914 (d 13 May 2005). “Father of linear programming”, John von Neumann Theory Prize, National Medal of Science (1975) The most famous story about him is the basis for the story line of the movie “Good Will Hunting” 1/5 🧵

Beatrice Shulamit Orleans b #OTD 1908 (d 22 Oct 2011) ASA Fellow 1979 Chief statistician, US Naval Sea Systems Command Developed quality control procedures & Bayesian sequential testing methods for assessing reliability & cost effectiveness of naval defense systems.

Arthur L Bowley b #OTD 1869 (d 21 Jan 1957) KBE, Guy Silver (1895) & Gold (1935) Medals, President RSS 1938-40. In 1919 he became one of the first Chair of Statistics in the UK. He,Yule & Edgeworth were the only RSS members interested in mathematical statistics for decades 1/2

Ida Craven Merriam b #OTD 1904 (d 8 Apr 1997) ASA Fellow 1965. Director of Research and Assistant Commissioner of the Office of Research and Statistics for the Social Security Administration, she built SAA research operations into “one of the very best in the federal government”.

Hirotugu Akaike b #OTD 1927 (d 4 Aug 2009) ASA Fellow 1981, RSS Fellow. His information criterion AIC was first presented in English in 1971. The 1974 publication is one of the top-cited statistics articles of all time, but AIC is now so commonly used it isn’t cited anymore

Joseph Stancliffe Davis b #OTD 1885 (d 23 April 1975) ASA Fellow 1924; 31st ASA President 1936. Director of Stanford’s Food Research Institute & international authority on world food production, he was an economist & member of Council of Economic Advisers to President Eisenhower

#OTD 2023 Colin Lingwood Mallows d (b 10 September 1930) ASA Fellow 1969; Elected Fellow IMS, RSS. Best known for the Cp statistic for regression model diagnostics developed with Cuthbert Daniel. They called it C after themselves, Cuthbert & Colin (p is the number of variables) 1/2

#OTD 1726 James Stirling was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. It cost him £20 to resign when he could no longer afford the annual fee. His main contribution to statistics is Stirling's asymptotic approximation for factorials fundamental to combinatorics & approximating gamma distribution.

#OTD 1815 George Boole b (d 8 Dec 1864) FRS ‘Father of binary logic’ best known for his system of Boolean logic, foundation for modern computing. His 1854 book “Laws of Thought” proposes methods to determine probabilities of events logically associated with any system of events. 1/2

On this Day of the Dead, let us remember John Graunt, Edmund Halley, & the almost unknown Edward Wigglesworth, inventors of the lifetable (or tables of mortality). Life tables find wide application in insurance, annuities, biology, & epidemiology 1/6 🧵

#OTD Abraham Wald b (d 13 Dec 1950) ASA Fellow 1945 Best known for his WWII work on aircraft survivability & survival bias, estimation and hypothesis testing. & sequential analysis. He was a member of the Statistical Research Group at Columbia formed in 1942 to support the war effort. 1/2

#OTD 1933 Jerzy Neyman (ASA Fellow 1942) and Egon Pearson (Honorary ASA Fellow) read a paper to the Royal Society where they first use the terms “Type I and Type II error”. In 1928, they had called them “first and second source of error” & in Feb 1933 “errors of first and second kind”.

Happy Belated 🎂to Pierre François Verhulst b 28 Oct 1804 (d 15 Feb 1849), who developed the logistic function as a model for limited population growth. Forgotten for almost 80 years, it was rediscovered by Pearl & Reed (1920) & Yule (1925) who revived the name ‘logistic’. 1/5

#OTD 1908 Margaret Gurney b (d 19 Mar 2002) ASA Fellow 1968. At the US Census Bureau she pioneered methods of variance estimation, sample surveys & non-sampling error. Awarded Department of Commerce Silver Medal for her work as an international statistical consultant & trainer.

#OTD 1893 Karl Pearson publishes a letter in Nature suggesting the method of moments for estimating parameters of asymmetrical frequency distributions. He trained as a physicist & borrowed the concept from physics, but it was first used by Chebyshev in his 1887 proof of the central limit theorem

#OTD Henry Norris Russell b (d 18 Feb 1957). An astronomer, he codeveloped the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram showing relationships of star luminosity & temperature. It is now a classic data set demonstrating the effect of extreme data outliers on regression model fits

#OTD 1930 Ronald Fisher writes his first article on fiducial inference. He uses the observed sample distribution of r to generate a probability distribution (“fiducial density”) for the unknown population correlation coefficient ρ without priors. 1/2

#OTD 1852 Augustus De Morgan first reports on the four-color conjecture (the problem of ‘unavoidable sets’) in a letter to William Rowan Hamilton. The problem is finally solved in 1976. 1/8🧵

#OTD 1903 Malcolm C. Rorty (ASA Fellow 1921, ASA President 1932), then an engineer at Bell Telephone, writes a memo that turns into a pioneering paper on the application of probability theory to estimate future service demand.

#OTD 1854 Florence Nightingale leaves for the Crimea with her aunt & 38 nurses. They arrive 13 days later. After 2 strenuous years, she returns to England to work with William Farr, reforming the collation & communication of medical statistics.

#OTD 1850 Gustav Fechner publishes Fechner’s Law describing the relationship between the magnitude of a physical stimulus & its perceived intensity. It was a precursor of probit regression later developed by Chester Bliss who rediscovered it & coined the term.

#OTD 1796 F Bisset Hawkins b (d 7 Dec 1894) an English physician, he promoted statistical analyses over clinical opinion for assessing treatment efficacy. The Bisset Hawkins Medal is awarded for work in sanitary science and public health.

#OTD 1884 Charles Sanders Peirce & Joseph Jastrow publish the first randomized and blinded trial in experimental psychology. Random sequence allocation was performed by shuffling ordinary playing cards, blinding by conducting experiments in pairs with allocation concealed from one partner.

#OTD 1900 WFR Weldon writes to Karl Pearson about Gregor Mendel's 1866 paper on the inheritance of traits in peas. They conclude Mendel’s ratios are too good to be true, triggering a bitter decades-long feud between them (the ‘Biometricians’) & the ‘Mendelians’ (Bateson, Saunders, and Punnett).

In Oct 1920 Ethel Edgerton (1874-1954) publishes an ambitious study attempting to measure the heritability of fingerprints. Francis Galton had pioneered their forensic use. She analysed Galton’s collection of several hundred familial forefinger prints. 1/3

#OTD 2021 David Card, Joshua Angrist, & Guido Imbens win the Nobel Prize in economics. They developed revolutionary methods & applications of ‘natural’ experiments for inferring causality in problems of labor economics, such as modelling the local average treatment effect (LATE).

#OTD 1937 Waren Milton Person d (b 12 Mar 1878) Inaugural ASA Fellow 1914, 18th ASA President 1923. Pioneered statistical methods to forecast business cycles. Somewhat surprisingly he also authored “Beer and Brewing in America: An economic study” 1938

#OTD 1924 John A Nelder b (d 7 Aug 2010) FRS 1976, Guy Silver 1977 & Gold Medal 2005. Made major contributions to design of experiments. Head of Statistics at Rothamsted 1968-84. Awarded the inaugural ISI Karl Pearson Prize with Peter McCullagh for developing generalized linear models.

#OTD Faith Moors Williams (Lorimer) b (d 20 Sep 1958). ASA Fellow 1946. Director of the Office of Foreign Labor Conditions in the Bureau of Labor Statistics & one of the architects of the BLS cost-of-living index, later the US Consumer Price Index.

The phrase “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is often attributed to Mark Twain who used it a lot, but he claimed to be quoting Benjamin Disraeli. However the phrase (and several variants) was already well-known: Carroll D. Wright (5th ASA president) was one of many users

#OTD 1841 Thomas Corwin Mendenhall b (d 22 Mar 1924) Father of “author profiling”, using word frequency distributions to identify individual writer styles. He kicked off the entire "Shakespeare was actually written by Francis Bacon or Kit Marlow" controversy although his data did not support it.

Counting-out rhymes used to select an item or person from a group (Eeny, meeny, miny, moe; Tinker, tailor; Eetam, peetam, penny pie) may have originated from the casting of lots for divination. They are not really 'random' selection processes as the results are determined by the starting selection

Today is the 75th anniversary of Alan’s Turing’s paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" published in journal Mind where he proposed the question, "Can machines think?" – the Turing Test

#OTD 1912 Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw b (d 10 Aug 2014) 1st F president of Manchester Statistical Society 1981-3 (& member for 70 years, 1944-2014). An accomplished mathematician she used statistics to affect government social policies especially for improved school standards & girls’ education.

Math or Maths? Unlike the USA, in the UK the S is kept in the short version of “mathematics”. Adding an S to field of study nouns (physics, economics) began in the 18th c. These are mass nouns (entities that cannot be counted), so the S is not a pluraliser but a “deadbeat second S” (as in “mass”)

OTD 1895 Harold Hotelling b (d 26 Dec 1973) ASA Fellow 1937. Pioneer in mathematical statistics (multivariate analysis, hypothesis testing, correlation) & economics (competition, game-theory, depreciation, resource exhaustion), 1/2

#OTD 1937 Olimpiy Kvitkin (b 30 Oct 1874) chief Soviet statistician was shot on Stalin's orders. Labelled an "enemy of the people" for producing politically inconvenient data, his census data contradicted Stalin's official state numbers & showed the effect of the 1932-3 famine (Holodomor).

#OTD 1822 Jean-François Champollion announces the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone. Although not a statistician, he used numerical pattern recognition to match frequency of symbols within cartouches to known Greek names, now standard codebreaking practice.

#OTD 1876 Edith Abbott b (d 28 Jul 1957) ASA Fellow 1945. One of the 1st F deans in the US, she pioneered statistical methods applied to policy development for welfare, education & protections for immigrants, working women & children

#OTD 1893 Harold Cramér b (d 5 Oct 1985; Sweden) "one of the giants of statistical theory" ASA Fellow 1950, RSS Guy Gold Medal 1972. Best known for Cramér-Rao inequality, Cramér-von Mises statistics, Cramér-Levey theorem

In Sept 1949 Stanislaw Ulam & Nicholas Metropolis introduced the method of Monte Carlo computer-intensive probability-based sampling. Ulam got the idea from playing solitaire during recovery from surgery. 1/2

#OTD 1759 William Playfair b (d 11 Feb 1823) A Scottish engineer he invented or improved numerous statistical graphics methods still used today, including line, area, bar & pie charts. 1/3

AmStat History of Statistics @hos-asa.bsky.social is taking a break for a few weeks to attend the Royal Statistical Society conference & then go walkabout. Posts will resume the last week of September.

#OTD 31 Aug 1918 Major André-Louis Cholesky is killed in action. His matrix decomposition method for solving systems of n linear equations is published posthumously. Thirty years later in 1948 Alan Turing demonstrates the stability of the method for large-n machine computations.

#OTD 31 Aug 1907 Ruth Rice Puffer b (d 2 Sep 2002) ASA Fellow 1966, public health biostatistics and head of the Department of Health Statistics of the Pan American Health Organization . On their 100th anniversary PAHO listed her in the top 100 "public health heroes".

#OTD 1890 Julie E Backer b (d 31 Dec 1977) ISI Fellow 1948, bureau chief for the Norwegian Central Bureau of Statistics 1936–1956 & an influential researcher on public health, infant mortality, & population statistics

In 1605 Francis Bacon complains about researchers exaggerating scientific claims without substantive evidence & accepting claims of others as true without doing due diligence: he called this the “contract of error” (An Advancement of Learning)

In Aug 1934 the term ‘likelihood’ is first used in a Bayesian context by Harold Jeffreys as the "the theorem of Inverse Probability" where posterior probability is proportional to the product of the prior probability & the likelihood. Ronald Fisher had first used the term in its modern sense in 1921

#OTD 1882 Ethel May Newbold b (d 25 Mar 1933), Royal Statistical Society Fellow 1921, epidemiologist and first woman to be awarded the Guy Silver Medal in 1928. In 2014 the Bernoulli Society established the Ethel Newbold Prize for excellence in mathematical statistics research. #WomenInSTEM