It is 100 years since R A Fischer introduced the concept of “variance“(in his 1918 paper “The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance“). There is much that statistics has given us in the century that followed. Randomized clinical trials, and the means to analyze them, moved medicine fully into the modern, science-based era.Continue reading “100 years of variance”
Category Archives: History
Early Data Scientists
Casting back long before the advent of Deep Learning for the “founding fathers” of data science, at first glance you would rule out antecedents who long predate the computer and data revolutions of the last quarter century. But some consider John Tukey (below), the Princeton statistician who named and developed the field of “exploratory data analysis,”Continue reading “Early Data Scientists”
Python for Analytics
Python started out as a general purpose language when it was created in 1991 by Guido van Rossum. It was embraced early on by Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page (“Python where we can, C++ where we must” was reputedly their mantra). In 2006, van Rossum (right) went to work at Google, where heContinue reading “Python for Analytics”
Historical Spotlight: Eugenics – journey to the dark side at the dawn of statistics
April 27 marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Karl Pearson, who contributed to statistics the correlation coefficient, principal components, the (increasingly-maligned) p-value, and much more. Pearson was one of a trio of founding fathers of modern statistics, the others being Francis Galton and Ronald Fisher. Galton, Pearson and Fischer were deeply involved withContinue reading “Historical Spotlight: Eugenics – journey to the dark side at the dawn of statistics”
Convoys
Ever wonder why, in World War II, ships in convoys were safer than ships traveling on their own? Most people assume it was due to the protection afforded by military escort vessels, of which there was a limited supply (insufficient to protect ships traveling on their own). Actually, most of the benefit came from theContinue reading “Convoys”