F Bisset Hawkins b #OTD 1796 (d 7 Dec 1894) A physician, he promotes statistical analyses over clinical opinion for assessing treatment efficacy. His 1829 8-volume “Elements of Medical Statistics” presents analyses of the ‘salubrity’ of the civilized world. (Spoiler alert: The English are Best).

#OTD 1884 Charles Sanders Peirce & Joseph Jastrow publish the first randomized & blinded trial in experimental psychology. Random sequence allocation was performed by shuffling ordinary playing cards & blinding by conducting experiments in pairs with allocation concealed from one partner.

Nikolai Smirnov b #OTD 1900 (d 2 Jun 1966) one half of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test (unified & streamlined by William Feller in 1948; popularized by Frank Massey in 1951) & contributor to the Cramér–von Mises–Smirnov criterion for assessing goodness of fit of a cumulative distribution function.

#OTD 1900 WFR Weldon writes to Karl Pearson about Mendel's 1866 paper on the inheritance of traits in peas. They conclude the ratios are too good to be true, triggering a bitter decades-long feud between them (the ‘Biometricians’) & William Bateson, Edith Saunders, & RC Punnett (the ‘Mendelians’).

Lemuel Shattuck b #OTD 1793 (d 17 Jan 1859) One of the five founders of the American Statistical Association & first ASA secretary. A bookseller, historian, as well as social statistician & pioneer of modern public health, his name is on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine building.

#WomeninStatistics The "Mother of British Plant Genetics", Edith Rebecca Saunders b #OTD 1865, popularised the use of what we now call contingency tables & binomial and combinatorial expansions to model multi-gene inheritance & test predictions of Mendel's Law of independent assortment.

The British Computer Society (BCS) is founded #OTD 1957. The founding president was the computer pioneer, Maurice Wilkes; his successor in 1960 was Frank Yates of Rothamsted who introduced the Elliott 401 computer & was a major player in the initial development of statistical computing.

A giant of statistical quality control, W Edwards Deming b #OTD 1900 (d 20 Dec 1993), ASA Fellow 1942. He revolutionized postwar industry as well as business leadership & management practices through pioneering application of quality management methods. 1/2

The phrase “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is often attributed to Mark Twain 1907 who claimed to be quoting Benjamin Disraeli. But Disraeli never said it & the phrase was used in 1895 by Leonard Courtney, RSS president & in 1896 by Carroll D. Wright (5th ASA president). Its earliest use was 1891

JJ Sylvester's foundational work on matrix algebra, quadratic forms, & variance underpins modern mathematical statistics. His teaching career was less happy. Rumors how he killed a student when he was at the University of Virginia in 1841 were exaggerated but based on fact. 1/2

OTD 1887 Dorr Eugene Felt is granted a patent for his “comptometer,” the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator. He makes the prototype from a wooden macaroni box, with a jackknife with wood meat skewers for keys, staples as key guides & elastic bands for springs. 1/2

William Kruskal b #OTD 1919 (d 21 Apr 2005) ASA Fellow 1958, ASA President 1982, Samuel Wilks Award 1978. Best known for the 1952 Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA rank test (with W.A. Wallis) & in 1954 a landmark series of papers with Leo Goodman on measures of association for cross-classifications.

Maurice Quenouille b #OTD 1924 (d 12 Dec 1973) the creator of jackknife resampling 1956 (John Tukey gave it the cool name 1958) He made major contributions to experimental design including taste testing designs & promoted the advantages of partial correlations for testing time series structure 1/2

John A Nelder b #OTD 1924 (d 7 Aug 2010), Head of Statistics at Rothamsted 1968-84. Guy Silver 1977 & Gold Medals 2005 for major contributions to design of experiments & codeveloping generalized linear models with Peter McCullagh, for which they received the inaugural ISI Karl Pearson Prize.

Edward Wright baptized #OTD 1561. In 1599 he proposes the median as a measure of central tendency & methods of variance estimation for navigational application. He is also the first (& so far only) Fellow of Caius College Cambridge to be granted sabbatical leave to be a pirate.

Charles Marvin b #OTD 1858 (d 5 June 1943) Chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, he pioneered the use of periodograms, spectral analysis, & probability-based tests of periodicity to assess evidence for recurring meteorological cycles and distinguish meteorological signals from random variation & noise.

#OTD Faith Moors Williams (Lorimer) b (d 20 Sep 1958). ASA Fellow 1946. Director of the Office of Foreign Labor Conditions in the Bureau of Labor Statistics & one of the architects of the BLS cost-of-living index, later the US Consumer Price Index.

And Now for Something Completely Different: #OTD 1969 Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuts on BBC1. In the skit "People Falling Out of High Buildings" Eric Idle & John Cleese use Olivetti Underwood & Victor Premiere adding machines to calculate the statistics of people falling out of high buildings

Happy 🎂 to James Lind b #OTD 1716 (d 3 July 1794) A Scottish physician, he is best known for conducting what is often regarded as the first modern clinical trial, a comparative test of treatments for scurvy. 1/11 🧵

#OTD 1841 Thomas Corwin Mendenhall b (d 22 Mar 1924) He was father of “author profiling”, the use of word frequency distributions to identify individual writer styles. He kicked off the Shakespeare authorship question by proposing Sir Francis Bacon and Kit Marlow as the 'true authors.

Referring to the normal distribution as a bell curve may have originated with Esprit Jouffret in 1872 (he called it a 'Cloche’). Francis Edgeworth called it the 'gend'arme's hat' 1888. He went on to describe other distributions in terms of a whole cupboardful of hats

In his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" published #OTD 1950 Alan Turing proposes a practical test of the question "Can machines think?" A machine passes if a human interrogator cannot reliably distinguish its responses to a text-based test from those of a human - the Turing test

Donald Preece b #OTD 1938 (d 6 Jan 2014) Fellow RSS 1963. A champion of experimental design& statistics education. He often complained about the over-emphasis on “mathematically-oriented teaching” at the expense of practicalities of study planning, design, data collection, & data cleaning.

#WomeninStatistics Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw b #OTD 1912. First F president of Manchester Statistical Society 1981-3 (& member for 70 years, 1944-2014). A well-known mathematician she used statistics to influence government policy on social issues, improved school standards and girls’ education.

Math or Maths? Unlike Americans, UK users keep the S in the short version of “mathematics”. Adding an S to field-of-study nouns (physics, economics) began in the 18th cent. Because it denotes entities that cannot be counted, the S is not a pluraliser but a “deadbeat second S” (as in “mass”)

Harold Hotelling b #OTD 1895 (d 26 Dec 1973) ASA Fellow 1937. A pioneer in mathematical statistics & economics he was also first to recognise the revolutionary importance of Fisher’s 'Statistical Methods for Research Workers' for applied statistics

#OTD 1937 Olimpiy Kvitkin (b 30 Oct 1874) chief Soviet statistician was shot on the order of Stalin. Th official census reports proved the reality of the 1932 Soviet famine The Holodomor resulting from Stalin's disastrous forced agricultural collectivization programmes.

#WomenInStatistics Hilda Geiringer-von Mises b #OTD 1893 (d 22 March 1973) IMS Fellow. A first-rate mathematical statistics scholar, she is also a ‘missed genius’. A refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe she was denied a permanent faculty position at US research universities because of her gender.

#WomenInStatistics Edith Abbott b #OTD 1876 (d 28 Jul 1957) ASA Fellow 1945. One of the 1st F deans in the US, she pioneered statistical methods applied to policy development for welfare, education & protections for immigrants, working women & children

Harold Cramér b #OTD 1893 (d 5 Oct 1985) ASA Fellow 1950, RSS Guy Gold Medal 1972. Called one of the giants of statistical theory" he is known for Cramér-Rao inequality, Cramér-von Mises statistics, Cramér-Levey theorem