ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group

The History of Statistics IG brings together individuals and groups with an active interest in the history of statistics, to share research and resources.

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

Starting today HOS_ASA will be leaving this platform and migrating over to bluer skies🦋 Join us at @hos-asa.bsky.social for all things in statistics history

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

#OTD 1937 Joseph L Fleiss b (d 12 Jun 2003) 🇺🇸@AmStatNews Fellow 1973, President @ENAR 1986. Best known for the intraclass correlation coefficient ICC, & his classic books ‘Statistical Methods for Rates and Proportions’ & ‘Design and Analysis of Clinical Experiments’

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

2/ refs
Hodges A 2012 Alan Turing: The Enigma Princeton
Turing AM. Proc London Math Soc Series 2 (1937) 42 (1): 230–65; 43(6) 544-6.

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

#OTD 1936 Alan Turing reads his paper "On computable numbers," to the London Mathematical Society in which he introduces what called it the "a-machine" (automatic machine) His doctoral advisor Alonzo Church later called it the "Turing machine" /2

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

3/ As Chief Statistician of Paris he did statistical analyses and spatiotemporal mapping of the 1889–1890 influenza epidemic

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

#OTD 1851 Jacques Bertillon b (d 4 July 1922) 🇫🇷Physician, statistician demographer. Introduced the Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death, precursor of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) /4

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

2/ He was the son of statistician Louis-Adolphe & brother of Alphonse (creator of the Bertillon biometric method & inventor of the mugshot). Here is Jacques’ mugshot

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

3/Refs
Work with new electronic 'brains' opens field for Army math experts. The Hammond Times Nov 10 1957, 66.
https://t.co/QZDgezSCdr
Babbage C 1864. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

#OTD 1957 the Times Daily, Hammond Indiana introduces the term GIGO “garbage in-garbage out…part of the workday vocabulary of the military mathematicians who man the Army’s electronic computors [sic]”. GIGO is still a major concern for AI and ML models. /3

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

2/ It was first floated by Babbage 1864: “On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question”

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

3/ Refs
Morse PM. 1984. A history of the Statistical Research Service, Ottawa. Contrib. 1-643, Eng. Stat. Res. Serv., Res. Br, Agric. Can., Ottawa. 32 p.
Note. JASA 62, 315-8 1967
Biometrics 1951 7: 287-912; Biometrics 1956, 12: 40-9

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

#OTD 2009 Pamela M [Clarke] d (b c. 1923) 🇬🇧🇨🇦@AmStatNews Fellow 1984. Agricultural statistician contributing to DOE & analysis of lattice designs with unequal block sizes, relative potency estimates in multiple assays /3

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

2/ Educated at Oxford she worked at Rothamsted 1947-9, National Institute for Research in Dairying 1949-57 & UK Atomic Energy before going to Canada 1958 to work at Statistical Research Service, Agriculture Canada, Ottawa.

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

5/ Refs Dantzig G 1940. Annals Math Stat, 11 (2): 186–192; 1951 Annals Math Stat, 22, 87-93
Albers, Reid, and Dantzig, An Interview with George B. Dantzig: The Father of Linear Programming, College Math J 17 (1986) 292-314.

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

#OTD 1914 George B Dantzig b (d 13 May 2005)🇺🇸 National Medal of Science 1975. “Father of linear programming”, mathematical optimization, simplex algorithm. Professor of Operations Research & Computer Science at Stanford University /5

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

4/ Later when Danzig was looking for a thesis topic: “Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder & he would accept them as my thesis."

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

3/refs
Orleans BS, Higdon HE 1974 Naval Engineers J, 82(5) 87-101
Eldridge MD et al 1982 Amer Stat, 35 (2), 69-81
Obituary Washington Post 27 Nov 2011.

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

#OTD 1908 Beatrice S. Orleans b (d 22 Oct 2011)🇺🇸 @AmStatNews Fellow 1979 Chief statistician, US Naval Sea Systems Command, largest of the 5 systems commands. One of the first women designing naval statistical quality control procedures /3

[ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group @HOS_ASA]

2/ Developed Bayesian sequential testing methods for assessing reliability & cost effectiveness of naval defense systems.
Co-author of 1982 ASA report on the training of statisticians for federal government careers