#OTD 1901 Howard B. Myers b (d 9 Mar 1956) ASA Fellow 1946; Director of research, Committee for Economic Development; developer of key federal unemployment indices

#OTD 1766 Thomas Malthus b (d 29 Dec 1834) Cofounder in 1834 of the Statistical Society of London (now Royal Statistical Society) with Charles Babbage & Adolph Quetelet. 1/3

#OTD 1890 Isabella Leitch b (d 21 Jul 1980) nutritional physiologist. A major contributor to development & quality improvement of the systematic review, she was among the first to affirm that reviews must be held to the same high scientific standards as ‘primary’ laboratory research.

#OTD 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded. Among the 60 co-signatories of The Call-the manifesto issued by black intellectuals & white liberal reformers -were Prof WEB duBois and Dr Kate Claghorn, first woman ASA Fellow

Happy belated🎂to Winfield William Riefler (9 Feb 1897-9 Apr 1974) ASA Fellow 1935, ASA President 1941. One of the creators of the Federal Housing Administration. Professor of Economics and Politics at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study; Director National Bureau of Economic Research

#OTD 1887 Neva Deardroff b (d 20 Aug 1958) outstanding social welfare and health statistician, longtime ASA member. Director of research at the NY Welfare Council, founder of the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York. Trained as an economic historian, her PhD was on 16th cent commerce

#OTD 1916 Regina Loewenstein b (d 16 May 1999) Public health statistician at Columbia; ASA Fellow 1976; Co-founder of ASA Caucus for Women in Statistics 1971. Columbia awards the Regina Loewenstein Prize for academic excellence in health policy and management studies.

#OTD 1854 Richmond Mayo-Smith b (d 11 Nov 1901) ASA VP 1889-1901 & founding member of the "new" ASA, we have him to thank for its transformation into a modern, scientifically rigorous, professional organization. 1/2

#OTD 1845 Francis Ysidro Edgeworth b (d 13 Feb 1926) President RSS 1912-14. His work anticipated many key ideas in modern mathematical statistics such as ANOVA, least squares detrending & significance testing. Sadly, his obscure writing style limited the accessibility and impact of his work 1/3

#OTD 1587 Mary Queen of Scots was executed on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth I. On the 2023 anniversary of her death, decryption of her cypher letters was made public. Researchers used modern computerized cryptanalysis methods, plus old-fashioned manual codebreaking & linguistic analyses.

#OTD 1700 Daniel Bernoulli b (d 17 Mar 1782) His statistical contributions included work on probability, political economy & one of the first attempts (1766) to analyze censored data in a study of smallpox morbidity & mortality.

In Feb 1855 Dr Edwin Snow reports on the statistics of a cholera outbreak in Providence RI. Like John Snow (no relation) he correctly identifies waterborne causes & social contributing factors & promotes population-level disease tracking through mapping.

#OTD 1802 Sir Charles Wheatstone b (d 19 Oct 1875) commissioned Ada Countess of Lovelace to translate from French to English a lecture given by his friend Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine 1842. Her Notes added to the translation included Note G, the first computer program 1/2

#OTD 2019 Edward Simpson d (b 10 Dec 1922) The Simpson of Simpson's paradox (& featured in an episode of The Simpsons). A Bletchley Park code breaker with Alan Turing 1942-5, in 2017, aged 95, he contributed 2 book chapters to The Bletchley Park Codebreakers on the crypt-analytic process Banburismus

Celebrating Black History Month: James McCune Smith (1813 –1865) First African American with medical degree. Founding member of NY Statistical Society he used statistics to assess therapeutic efficacy, criticize homeopathy & expose errors in the 1840 U.S. census used to support pro slavery arguments

#OTD 1877 Janet Lane-Claypon, Lady Forber b (d 17 Jul 1967) One of the first Dr-Dr (both MD and DSc), she was a pioneer of case-control & retrospective cohort study design. Also credited with several firsts in medical epidemiological studies: t-test applications & earliest discussion of confounding

#OTD 1880 Jessamine Sophia Whitney b (d 11 Mar 1941) An internationally recognized public health expert & long-term ASA member (but never elected Fellow). First woman to be a national representative at the 1929 Paris International Conference on the Classification of Causes of Deaths 1/2

#OTD 1899 Chester Ittner Bliss b (d 14 Mar 1979) ASA Fellow 1942. Founder & first Secretary International Biometrics Society. IBS broke away from the ASA Biometrics Section to form a new home for biologists & biostatisticians. Credited with developing probit function for dose response assays

#OTD 1938 the word 'googol' meaning 1.0 × 10^100 appears in the "Science Today" column in the Dunkirk (NY) Evening Observer. It was coined in 1920 by Milton Sirotta, aged 9. His uncle mathematician Edward Kasner popularized it in his 1940 book 'Mathematics and the Imagination' 1/2

#OTD 1875 #Florence_Nightingale writes a letter acknowledging her induction as first woman Honorary Member of the American Statistical Association. A copy of her letter is at the ASA Virginia headquarters, and the original is in the ASA records archive at Iowa State University.

In Jan 1888 Henry Prevost Babbage, with a mechanical calculator he calls The Analytical Mill built from plans developed by his dad Charles Babbage, completes a table of multiples of the first 29 digits of π. He finally publishes the results in April 1910, but the Mill made a lot of mistakes.

#OTD 1892 Carlos Bonferroni b (d 18 Aug 1960) Trained as a musician then switched to maths. Developed Bonferroni inequalities 1935-6. However Olive Dunn developed the Bonferroni adjustment for simultaneous inference & named it for him.

#OTD 1832 Charles Dodgson b (d 14 Jan 1898) World famous as Lewis Carroll, author of ‘Alice in Wonderland’, his day job was as lecturer at Oxford. He worked on probability, linear & matrix algebra, symbolic logic & developed Dodgson condensation for computing determinants of square matrices. 1/2

#OTD 1904 Evelyn Fix b (d 30 Dec 1965) Codeveloper of the k-nearest neighbour method that became a key component of machine learning. Collaborated with Jerzy Neyman on χ² test power & stochastic survival models; & FN David (her life partner) on epidemiology.

#OTD 1871 Carroll Warren Doten b (d 15 Jun 1942) Elected 16th president of ASA in 1921, he was professor of economics at MIT

#OTD 1630 Henry Briggs d (b 1 Feb 1561) A fanboy of John Napier's logarithms in 1617 he developed his own system of base-10 logs for integers from 1 to 1000 to 14 decimal places. In 1631 he really pushed out the boat and published a table for sines and tangents to 15 places & secants to 10 places

#OTD 1736 Joseph-Louis Lagrange b (d 10 Apr 1813) Made outstanding contributions to probability including the first complete analytical solution to the problem of duration of games of chance which had stumped de Moivre. 1/2

#OTD 1895 Karl Pearson expands on his definition of the histogram, from a time diagram to a method quantifying non-normal distributions with superimposed equations of skew frequency. This was fairly radical, as it went against Galton’s belief that all distributions *should * be normally distributed.

The Latin square is a row-column experimental design for two blocking factors. Ronald Fisher introduced it to modern users in 1926 but it originated with Euler (1782) who called it a 'magic square’ (quadratis magicis) & was first applied by Francois Cretté de Palluel in 1788 in a study of sheep diet

#OTD 1925 Annie T Randall b (d 16 Aug 2021) Mathematical statistician at NIH Mental Health Biometrics branch. A trailblazer for African American women in federal science agencies, the ASA Annie T. Randall Innovator Award recognizes contributions of early-career statistical innovators.

Although William Playfair (1759-1824) is credited with developing the bar chart, in the 1300s Nicole Oresme developed "proto" bar chart diagrams to explain velocity. He also developed the idea of incommensurate fractions & made probabilistic statistical arguments about their relative frequency

#OTD 2012 Stella Cunliffe d (b 12 Jan 1917) First woman President of the Royal Statistical Society 1975. Home Office Director of Statistics she shaped key public policy on crime & punishment. When working at Guinness she pioneered novel statistically based quality control assessment methods

#OTD 1910 Walter Elliot Duffett b (d 27 Aug 1982) ASA Fellow 1963. Dominion Statistician 1957-1972, first Chief Statistician of Canada 1971 when Dominion Bureau of Statistics became Statistics Canada. On his watch the organization grew rapidly & formalized operational independence & objectivity

#OTD 2022 Sir David Roxbee Cox d (b 15 Jul 1924) “the most eminent statistician of the twentieth century” who developed pioneering & hugely influential statistical methods, the best known being the Cox proportional hazards model.

#OTD 1921 Eva E. Jacobs b (d 28 Apr 2015) ASA Fellow 1982, ASA Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics 1998. Survey statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, she was Chief of Division of Consumer Expenditure Surveys for 20 yrs

#OTD 1886 Harold Ordway Rugg b (d 17 May 1960) ASA Fellow 1922, used designed experiments to reform the American education system & promote social change. His progressive agenda angered the political right who banned and censored his textbooks for being “prosocialist”, subversive & anti-American.

#OTD 1912 Selma (Fine) Goldsmith b (d 15 April 1962) ASA Fellow 1962. Chief of Income & Statistics, US Census Bureau, she made trailblazing contributions to the study of income size distribution & inequalities, developing innovative methodologies for obtaining usable data from diverse sources.

In Jan 1977 Sir Richard Peto & a distinguished group of British & American statisticians publish the first methodological tutorial specifically intended for non-statisticians on survival analysis of randomised controlled trials. 1/2

In Jan 1937 in the British Medical Journal Donald Mainland (ASA Fellow 1954) argues for the compelling need for medical statistics education targeted to physicians. It results from a testy exchange with the irate author of a clinical study that Mainland had politely but effectively demolished. 1/5

In Jan 1938 the first Indian Statistical Conference takes place in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Sir Ronald A Fisher is appointed conference President. In his keynote address he traces the development and application of statistics in public life and the origins and purpose of significance testing.

#OTD 1900 Gertrude Cox b (d 17 Oct 1978) ASA Fellow 1947, 3rd woman ASA President 1956. Hon RSS Fellow 1957; National Academy of Sciences 1975. A champion of applied statistics & experimental design she was one of the most influential statisticians of the 20th century

#OTD 1925 Yvonne M M Bishop b (d 26 May 2015) ASA Fellow 1975. Coauthored THE book on multivariate statistics. Director Office of Statistical Standards. Her research on anesthetics revolutionised surgical safety & ushered in a new emphasis on medical quality improvement & modern data processing.

#OTD 1908 Marc Daniels b (d 03 Mar 1953) In 1951 (40 years before CONSORT) he published the first clinical trial reporting guidelines for anti-tuberculosis chemotherapy. Doug Altman greatly admired him

Walter Sherman Gifford b #OTD 885 (d 7 May 1966) ASA Fellow 1916. Efficiency expert and president of AT&T. He used statistical methods to solve industrial problems, catapulting AT&T to become the world’s largest corporate enterprise.

Edward Jarvis, 3rd American Statistical Association President b #OTD 1803 (d 31 Oct 1884) His tenure as ASA president was the longest - he served over 30 years 1852-1884. He wrote extensively on vital statistics, sanitation & mental illness & donated his statistical library to ASA at his death

#OTD 1889 Herman Hollerith receives patent no. 395,782 for the first tabulating machine & wins the contract to process the 1890 US census data; his machine translated data from paper questionnaires to machine-readable data in 72 h and sorted it into categories in <6 h (10x faster than competitors)

Happy🎂Richard Fletcher b #OTD 1788 first President of the American Statistical Society (as it was called then) from 1839 to 1845. A lawyer and Massachusetts congressman, he was only a figurehead for the new society; the real leader was Secretary Lemuel Shattuck.

in Jan 1902 Mr Oswald H Latter published what may be the first significance test in a comparative biology study. He compared measurements of 243 cuckoo eggs with 288 eggs from 42 host species & classified differences as ‘significant’ or not based on the ratio of differences to probable error.

OTD 1655 Jacob Bernoulli b (d Aug 16 1705). In his 1713 posthumous work Ars Conjectandi he derives a version of the law of large numbers (from which we get the term Bernoulli trial). He also talks about combinatorics, Bernoulli numbers, exponential series, & winning at gambling.

#OTD 1901 Aryness Joy Wickens b (d 2 Feb 1991) Second woman elected ASA Fellow 1937 (after a twenty-yr gap! Kate Claghorn was first in 1918) and second woman ASA President 1952. Acting Commissioner of Labor Statistics & one of the developers of US Consumer Price Index