Bookmarks
All vignettes are written by Nicholas J. Cox, Durham University, United
Kingdom. An index of the vignettes available in the Stata documentation
can be found in the Quick Reference and
Index.
Details: Series 1
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André-Louis Cholesky
André-Louis Cholesky (1875–1918) was born near Bordeaux in
France. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique and then joined the French
army. Cholesky served in Tunisia and Algeria and then worked in the
Geodesic Section of the Army Geographic Service, where he invented his
now-famous method. In the war of 1914–1918, he served in the Vosges
and in Romania but after return to the Western front was fatally wounded.
Cholesky’s method was written up posthumously by one of his fellow
officers but attracted little attention until the 1940s.
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Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) was born in Braunschweig
(Brunswick), now in Germany. He studied there and at Göttingen. His
doctoral dissertation at the University of Helmstedt was a discussion of the
fundamental theorem of algebra. He made many fundamental contributions to
geometry, number theory, algebra, real analysis, differential equations,
numerical analysis, statistics, astronomy, optics, geodesy, mechanics, and
magnetism. An outstanding genius, Gauss worked mostly in isolation in
Göttingen.
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William Sealy Gosset
William Sealy Gosset (1876–1937) was born in Canterbury, England. He
studied chemistry and mathematics at Oxford and obtained employment as a
chemist with the brewers Guinness in Dublin. Gosset became very interested
in statistical problems, which he discussed with Karl Pearson and later with
Fisher and Neyman, and published several important papers under the pseudonym
“Student”, including that on the test that usually bears his
name.
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Leslie Kish
Leslie Kish (1910–2000) was born in Poprad, Hungary, and entered the
United States with his family in 1926. He worked as a lab assistant at the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and studied at the College of the
City of New York, fighting in the Spanish Civil War before receiving his
first degree in mathematics. Kish worked for the Bureau of the Census, the
Department of Agriculture, the Army Air Corps, and finally the University of
Michigan. He carried out pioneering work in the theory and practice of
survey sampling, including design effects, balanced repeated replication,
response errors, rolling samples and censuses, controlled selection,
multipurpose designs, and small-area estimation.
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Frank Wilcoxon
Frank Wilcoxon (1892–1965) was born in Ireland to American parents.
After working in various occupations (including merchant seaman, oil-well
pump attendant and tree surgeon), he settled in chemistry, gaining degrees
from Rutgers and Cornell and employment from various companies. Working
mainly on the development of fungicides and insecticides, Wilcoxon became
interested in statistics in 1925 and made several key contributions to
nonparametric methods. After retiring from industry, he taught statistics
at Florida State until his death.
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Details: Series 2
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Ronald Aylmer Fisher
Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962) (Sir Ronald from 1952) studied mathematics
at Cambridge. Even before he finished his studies, he had published on
statistics. He worked as a statistician at Rothamsted Experimental Station
(1919–1933), as professor of eugenics at University College London
(1933–1943), as professor of genetics at Cambridge (1943–1957), and in
retirement at the CSIRO Division of Mathematical Statistics in Adelaide. His
many fundamental and applied contributions to statistics and genetics mark
him as one of the greatest statisticians of all time, including original
work on tests of significance, distribution theory, theory of estimation,
fiducial inference, and design of experiments.
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Francis Galton
Francis Galton (1822–1911) was born in Birmingham, England, into a
well-to-do family with many connections: he and Charles Darwin were first
cousins. After an unsuccessful foray into medicine, he became independently
wealthy at the death of his father. Galton traveled widely in Europe, the
Middle East, and Africa, and he became celebrated as an explorer and
geographer. His pioneering work on weather maps helped in the
identification of anticyclones, which he named. From about 1865, most of
his work was centered on quantitative problems in biology, anthropology, and
psychology. In a sense, Galton (re)invented regression, and he certainly
named it. Galton also promoted the normal distribution, correlation
approaches, and the use of median and selected quantiles as descriptive
statistics. He was knighted in 1909.
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Adrien-Marie Legendre
Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) was born in Paris (or possibly in
Toulouse) and educated in mathematics and physics. He worked in number
theory, geometry, differential equations, calculus, function theory, applied
mathematics, and geodesy. The Legendre polynomials are named for him. His
main contribution to statistics is as one of the discoverers of least
squares. He died in poverty, having refused to bow to political pressures.
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James Tobin
James Tobin (1918–2002) was an American economist who after education and
research at Harvard moved to Yale, where he was on the faculty from 1950 to
1988. He made many outstanding contributions to economics and was awarded
the Nobel Prize in 1981 “for his analysis of financial markets and their
relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices.” He
appeared thinly disguised as a character in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine
Mutiny (1951) who thwarts the ambition of Willie Keith to be the first in
his class at midshipman school: “A mandarin-like midshipman named Tobit,
with a domed forehead, measured quiet speech, and a mind like a sponge, was
ahead of the field by a spacious percentage.”
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Ernst Hjalmar Waloddi Weibull
Ernst Hjalmar Waloddi Weibull (1887–1979) was a Swedish applied
physicist most famous for his work on the statistics of material properties.
He worked in Germany and Sweden as an inventor and a consulting engineer,
publishing his first paper on the propagation of explosive waves in 1914,
thereafter becoming a full professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in
1924. Weibull’s ideas about the statistical distributions of material
strength came to the attention of engineers in the late 1930s with the
publication of two important papers: “Investigations into strength
properties of brittle materials” and “The phenomenon of rupture
in soils.”
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