ASA History of Statistics Special Interest Group

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#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’

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.

#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

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

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

#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

3/Refs Work with new electronic 'brains' opens field for Army math experts. The Hammond Times Nov 10 1957, 66. wordhistories.net/2022/12/05/gar… Babbage C 1864. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

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”

#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

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

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.

#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

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.

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."

#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

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.

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

#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