About this project

This is the brainchild of Sam Tyner (@sctyner) and Kiegan Rice (@kiegan), both alumni of the Iowa State University statistics department, one of the oldest in the country. This project is inspired by the discussion surrounding this twitter thread by Daniela Witten, the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Washington. Briefly, the thread is grappling with having our prestigious statistics awards be named after RA Fisher, a eugenicist, and what that means about who we celebrate in our profession.

Sam and Kiegan feel that we know very little about the history of statistics and the history of the statisticians whose work we rely on every day. This document is intended to be a crowd-sourced collection of resources for statisticians to learn about our own history. Please contribute by filing an issue or a pull request. Note that by contributing to this project you agree to adhere to the contributor code of conduct. Please read it carefully.

Contributor Code of Conduct

This code of conduct is taken from ggplot2.

As contributors and maintainers of this project, we pledge to respect all people who contribute through reporting issues, posting feature requests, updating documentation, submitting pull requests or patches, and other activities.

We are committed to making participation in this project a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of level of experience, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, or religion.

Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include the use of sexual language or imagery, derogatory comments or personal attacks, trolling, public or private harassment, insults, or other unprofessional conduct.

Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct. Project maintainers who do not follow the Code of Conduct may be removed from the project team.

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by opening an issue, emailing the project lead (sctyner90 at gmail dot com), or one of the core developers (ricek at iastate dot edu).

This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant (http://contributor-covenant.org), version 1.0.0, available at http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/0/0/

Resources for Learning about the History of Statistics and Statisticians

Wikipedia

Use wikipedia to begin to learn about the lives of statistics’ founding fathers and mothers, and about the history of statistics as a field.

• R.A. Fisher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher
• Karl Pearson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Pearson
• Florence Nightingale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale
• C.F. Gauss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
• The Bernoulli Family (Jacob Bernoulli & others): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_family
• David Blackwell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blackwell
• History of Statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics
• Statistical significance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance
• William Sealy Gosset:
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset
  • https://priceonomics.com/the-guinness-brewer-who-revolutionized-statistics/
• Grace Wahba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Wahba
• C. R. Rao: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._R._Rao
• Gertrude Cox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Mary_Cox
• Abraham Wald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
• Adolphe Quetelet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Quetelet

Websites

What websites are dedicated to the history of statistics & statisticians?

• History of Statistics ASA interest group: https://community.amstat.org/historyofstats/home
• This is Statistics list of "Famous Statisticians": https://thisisstatistics.org/famous-statisticians/
• ASA Statisticians in History: https://magazine.amstat.org/statisticians-in-history/
• IMS Statistical Science Conversations: https://imstat.org/journals-and-publications/statistical-science/conversations/
  • Some of the people interviewed include
    • Dorothy Gilford
    • Charles Stein
    • Nan Laird
    • David Cox
    • C.R. Rao
    • David Blackwell
    • Bradley Efron

Blogs & Blog posts

What blogs & blog posts have been written about the history of statistics & statisticians?

• Daniel Cleather, Is Statistics Racist?
  • "What is important to realise is that eugenics was far more than just a side interest for Galton, Pearson and Fisher. To a large part their desire to promote the eugenics agenda provided the motivation for their interest in statistics in the first place."
• Nathaniel Joselson, Eugenics and Statistics, Discussing Karl Pearson and R. A. Fisher
  • "In 'The Scope and Importance to the State of National Eugenics,' Pearson wrote that 'human sympathy' for people with genetic 'defects' (ie having mental illness, or being disabled) is undesirable. He said sympathy is an artificial process that goes against the principles of evolution and results in a decrease in the genetic fitness of society as a whole. Thus it is a waste to expend resources on people who are genetically inferior, when these resources could be used to improve people of 'good stock.'"
• Nathaniel Joselson, Eugenics and Statistics Part Two, Reflections and Implications
  • "Statistical significance, like every other observable phenomenon (gender, sexuality, race), is on a spectrum, not a categorical scale. Post-colonial understanding of statistical significance doesn't rely on p-values less than 0.05, but rather on holistic understanding of the data in question and the mathematical properties of the population that generated it. This is knowledge discovery, not hypothesis testing. This is interdisciplinary research, not isolated extrapolation by inherently biased human beings."
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Racist Statistics

Books

What books have been written about the history of statistics & statisticians? How critical of a perspective do they take?

• The Lady Tasting Tea by David Salsburg
• The Theory that Would Not Die by Sharon McGrayne
• The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 by Stephen M. Stigler (online archive)
• Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (1995) by Theodore Porter
  • Discussion of the history of statistics and the concept of objectivity showing how quantification involves administration, as well as social and technological power.
• Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age by Theodore Porter
  • An in depth discussion of the life of Pearson and his use of statistics as a means to provide guidance for a new socialist and eugenic order.
• The Cambridge History of Science volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences (2003)
  • "Statistics and Statistical Methods" by Theodore Porter
  • "Race and the Social Sciences by Elazar Barkan"
• Objectivity (2007) by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison
  • A more general study of the history of objectivity in the sciences and social sciences. Includes various discussions on the role of statistics in objectivity.
• Desrosières, A. (1990). "How to make things which hold together: Social science, statistics and the state." In P. Wagner, P., B. Wittrock, & R.P. Whitley (Eds.) Discourses on society: The shaping of the social science disciplines (Vol. 15, pp.195-218). Springer. (pdf)
• In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel Kevles (the larger history of eugenics as a scientific idea)
• The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrent (focusing on the role of "scientific racism" and eugenics in immigration debates)

Journals / Articles

What have our colleagues published in the literature about the history of statistics?

• Robert Langkjær‐Bain, "The troubling legacy of Francis Galton", Significance, Vol.16 No.3, 2019-05-29. Wiley Online Library, doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2019.01275.x
• Gillham, N. W. (2001). Sir Francis Galton and the birth of eugenics. Annual review of genetics, 35(1), 83-101.
• Anderson, M. (1992). The history of women and the history of statistics. Journal of Women's History, 4(1), 14-36. (pdf)

Podcasts

William Sealy Gosset: Background on Gossest's creation of the student-t test: http://lineardigressions.com/episodes/2016/2/29/guinness

Interviews

• An Oral History with David Blackwell: https://sites.tufts.edu/histmath/files/2015/11/blackwell.pdf
• A Conversation with Grace Wahba: https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1591171233
• Interview with Professor Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao: https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2016/12/01/raointerview/

News Articles

• How Eugenics Shaped Statistics: Exposing the Damned Lies of Three Science Pioneers: https://nautil.us/issue/92/frontiers/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics
• Breaking Ground with Grace: https://news.wisc.edu/breaking-ground-with-grace/
• Column: The false, racist theory of eugenics once ruled science. Let’s never let that happen again: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/column-the-false-racist-theory-of-eugenics-once-ruled-science-lets-never-let-that-happen-again
• About C.R. Rao: http://mathematics.ceu.edu/rao

Other

• Timeline of Statistics: http://www.statslife.org.uk/images/pdf/timeline-of-statistics.pdf
• AMS Feature Column: The Legend of Abraham Wald: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06