The Great Statisticians

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS  (1890 - 1962) was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist. Richard Dawkins described him as "The greatest of Darwin's successors", and the historian of statistics Anders Hald said "Fisher was a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science".His contributions to experimental design, analysis of variance, and likelihood based methods have led some to call him "The Father of Statistics".

Karl Pearson (1857 - 1936) was a major contributor to the early development of statistics, and founder of the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911. He was also an ardent and controversial proponent of eugenics. His most famous contribution is the Pearson's chi-square test.

Gertrude Mary Cox (1900 - 1978) was an influential American statistician and founder of the department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was later appointed director of both the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina and the Statistics Research Division of North Carolina State University. Her most important and influential research dealt with experimental design; she wrote an important book on the subject with W. G. Cochran. In 1949 Cox became the first female elected into the International Statistical Institute and in 1956 she was president of the American Statistical Association.

Frank Yates (1902 - 1994) was one of the pioneers of 20th century statistics. He worked on the design of experiments, including contributions to the theory of analysis of variance and originating Yates' algorithm and the balanced incomplete block design. He became an enthusiast of electronic computers, in 1954 obtaining an Elliott 401 for Rothamsted and contributing to the initial development of statistical computing.

John Wilder Tukey (1915 - 2000) was a professor of Statistics at Princeton University. A mathematician by training, his statistical interests were many and varied. He contributed significantly to what is today known as the jackknife procedure. He introduced the box plot in his 1977 book, Exploratory Data Analysis.He also contributed to statistical practice and articulated the important distinction between exploratory data analysis and confirmatory data analysis, believing that much statistical methodology placed too great an emphasis on the latter. 

By: Tito Nuevacobita Jr. 

III-GOLD