List of Famous Statisticians

Florence Nightingale (May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910) was an English social reformer and statistician. She founded modern nursing. Nightingale gained notice managing and training nurses during the Crimean War, organizing care for wounded soldiers. She earned nursing a good reputation. She became an icon of Victorian culture, known as "The Lady with the Lamp" who visited wounded soldiers at night. Some commentators claim media exaggerated Nightingale's Crimean War work, but critics agree.

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist. He won the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and stabilization policy complexity. Friedman joined George Stigler and others as intellectual leaders of the second generation of the Chicago School of Economics. This movement started at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School, and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward. Many students and young professors joined or were recruited by Friedman.

Howell Tong (simplified Chinese: 汤家豪; traditional Chinese: 湯家豪; pinyin: Tāng Jiāháo; born 1944 in Hong Kong) pioneers nonlinear time series analysis, connecting it with deterministic chaos. He created the threshold time series models. These models apply widely in ecology, economics, epidemiology, and finance. He is the originator of these models.

Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was an American inventor. He built an electromechanical punched card tabulator to help summarize information and accounting. Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company. In 1911, this company merged (through stock purchase) with three others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which became IBM in 1924. Hollerith is a key figure in data processing development. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine started the process.

Bjørn Lomborg (Danish: [pjɶɐ̯n ˈlɒmpɒːˀʊ̯]; born January 6, 1965) is a Danish author and President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center think tank. Lomborg formerly directed the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) in Copenhagen. He gained international fame with his controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). In it, he argues that many costly actions scientists and policymakers take against global warming will have little effect on rising world temperatures. In 2002, Lomborg a

William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900 – December 20, 1993) was an American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant. He studied electrical engineering first, then focused on mathematical physics. Deming helped develop sampling methods still used by the U.S. Department of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In his book, *The New Economics for Industry, Government, and Education*, Deming supported Walter Shewhart's work, including statistical process control, operational definitions, and what Deming called the "Shewhart Cycle".

Persi Warren Diaconis (born January 31, 1945) is an American mathematician of Greek descent and a former professional magician. He holds the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics position at Stanford University. Diaconis is known for solving mathematical problems involving randomness and randomization, like coin flipping and shuffling playing cards.

Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran FRS (July 14, 1917 – September 19, 1988), known as Pat Moran, was an Australian statistician. Moran made major contributions to probability theory and applying it to population and evolutionary genetics.

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (August 16, 1911 – September 4, 1977) was a German statistician and economist. He proposed human-scale, decentralized, and appropriate technologies. Schumacher served as Chief Economic Advisor to the British National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970. He founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action) in 1966. In 1995, *Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered*, his 1973 book, was ranked by The Times Literary Supplement among the 100 most influential books since World War II.

James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx (March 11, 1916 – May 24, 1995), was a British Labour politician. Wilson served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. Wilson entered Parliament in 1945. He became a parliamentary secretary in the Attlee ministry and quickly moved up the ranks; he became Secretary for Overseas Trade in 1947 and joined the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. In opposition to the next Conservative government, he served as Shadow Chancellor (1955–1961) and Shadow Foreign Secretary (196

Frank Ian Luntz, born February 23, 1962, is an American political consultant, pollster, and "public opinion guru." He develops talking points and messaging for Republican causes. Luntz assisted with messaging for Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and provided public relations support for pro-Israel policies in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He pushed for vocabulary changes, like using "death tax" instead of estate tax and "climate change" instead of global warming. Luntz frequently contributed to Fox News.

Victor Niederhoffer, born December 10, 1943, is a hedge fund manager, squash champion, bestselling author, and statistician.

Joseph Moses Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) was a Romanian-born American engineer and management consultant. He promoted quality and quality management, writing several books on the topic. Juran was the brother of Academy Award winner Nathan Juran.

Giovanni Villani (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoˈvanni vilˈlaːni]; c. 1276 or 1280 – 1348) was an Italian banker, official, diplomat, and chronicler from Florence. He wrote the Nuova Cronica (New Chronicles) on Florence's history. Villani was a leading statesman of Florence, but he later earned a bad reputation and served time in prison due to the bankruptcy of a trading and banking company he worked for. His focus on economic details, statistical information, and political and psychological insight shows he was a more modern chronicler of late medieval Europe.

Sir William Petty FRS (26 May 1623 – 16 December 1687) was an English economist, physician, scientist, and philosopher. Petty became prominent serving Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth in Ireland. He created efficient methods to survey land slated for confiscation and giving to Cromwell's soldiers. Petty remained an important figure under King Charles II and King James II, just like many others who served Cromwell. Petty briefly served in the Parliament of England. He also acted as a scientist, inventor, merchant, and a charter member of the Royal Society.

Nathaniel Read Silver, born January 13, 1978, is an American statistician and writer. He analyzes baseball (sabermetrics) and elections (psephology). Silver founded and edited FiveThirtyEight and serves as a Special Correspondent for ABC News. Silver first gained public recognition by developing PECOTA, a system to forecast Major League Baseball players' performance and career development. He sold PECOTA and then managed it for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009. After an election forecast, Silver was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time in 2009.

Simon Smith Kuznets (Russian: Семён Абра́мович Кузне́ц, IPA: [sʲɪˈmʲɵn ɐˈbraməvʲɪtɕ kʊzʲˈnʲɛts], April 30, 1901 – July 8, 1985) was an American economist and statistician. He earned the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his empirical interpretation of economic growth. This work provided new insight into the economic and social structure and process of development. Kuznets made a major contribution to turning economics into an empirical science and to building quantitative economic history.

Mir Masoom Ali, born February 1, 1937, is a Bangladeshi American statistician, Distinguished Professor, researcher, and author. He moved to the United States in 1969 and became a citizen in 1981. Ali started the graduate and undergraduate Statistics programs at Ball State University. He co-founded the Midwest Biopharmaceutical Statistics Workshop (MBSW-History), held yearly since 1978, with support from the American Statistical Association. Ali edited and served as an associate editor for several international statistical journals.

Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910 – July 16, 1981) was a Polish-born American statistician and an information theorist who won the Shannon Award. Wolfowitz was the father of Paul Wolfowitz, who later served as the former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense and World Bank Group President.

Sir Francis Galton, FRS (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), was an English Victorian-era statistician and polymath. He also worked as a sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician. In 1909, he received a knighthood. Galton published over 340 papers and books. He developed the statistical concept of correlation and pushed for regression toward the mean. Galton first used statistical methods to study human differences and intelligence inheritance, introducing questionnaires and surveys.

Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster FRS FRSE (12 September 1851 – 17 October 1934) was a German-born British physicist. He became known for his work in spectroscopy, electrochemistry, optics, X-radiography, and applying harmonic analysis to physics. People name his integral. Schuster helped make the University of Manchester a center for physics study.

David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician. He made major contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and Bayesian statistics. Blackwell is one of the people named after the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and the first Black tenured faculty member at UC Berkeley. He was the seventh African American to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics. Blackwell also pioneered textbook writing; he wrote one of the first Bayesian textbooks, Basic Statistics, in 1969.

James Durbin FBA (June 30, 1923 – June 23, 2012) was a British statistician and econometrician. He specialized in time series analysis and serial correlation.

Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE (December 9, 1895 – August 22, 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He created the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) as a model for biological research early on. He attacked the eugenics movement during his career. Hogben popularized books on science, mathematics, and language later in his life.

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, FRS, known as C R Rao (born September 10, 1920), is an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. Rao holds professor emeritus status at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts honored Rao. The US National Medal of Science went to him in 2002. The American Statistical Association calls him "a living legend." His work affected statistics, economics, genetics, and anthropology.

Bradley Efron (born May 24, 1938) is an American statistician. Efron served as president of the American Statistical Association in 2004 and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1987 to 1988. He edited the Journal of the American Statistical Association (theory and methods) and founded the Annals of Applied Statistics. Efron received many awards. Efron is famous for proposing the bootstrap resampling technique. This technique greatly affected statistics and nearly all statistical applications.

Edward Rolf Tufte (born March 14, 1942) is an American statistician and professor emeritus at Yale University. He taught political science, statistics, and computer science. Tufte wrote about information design. He pioneered data visualization.

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, FRSFor FRSE (pronounced [kətlɛ]), lived from February 22, 1796, to February 17, 1874. He was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist. Quetelet founded and ran the Brussels Observatory. He influenced the introduction of statistical methods into social sciences. Some spell his name with an accent: Quételet. He started the science of anthropometry and created the body mass index scale, first named the Quetelet Index.

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS (June 29, 1893 – June 28, 1972) was an Indian Bengali scientist and applied statistician. He gained fame for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure. He was also a member of India's first Planning Commission. Mahalanobis conducted pioneering studies in Indian anthropometry. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute. He helped design large-scale sample surveys. Mahalanobis is seen as the father of modern statistics.

Irving Fisher (February 27, 1867 – April 29, 1947) was an American economist, statistician, inventor, and Progressive social campaigner. He was an early American neoclassical economist. Later, his work on debt deflation gained acceptance from the post-Keynesian school. Joseph Schumpeter called him "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced." James Tobin and Milton Friedman repeated this assessment. Fisher made key contributions to utility theory and general equilibrium. He pioneered the rigorous study of intertemporal choice in mar.

Frank Wilcoxon (2 September 1892 – 18 November 1965) was a chemist and statistician who developed several statistical tests. Frank Wilcoxon was born to American parents on 2 September, 1892, in County Cork, Ireland. He grew up in Catskill, New York, but studied in England. In 1917, he graduated from Pennsylvania Military College with a B.Sc. After World War I, Wilcoxon began graduate studies. He earned an M.S. in chemistry from Rutgers University in 1921. He later obtained a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cornell University in 1924.

William Stanley Jevons FRS (September 1, 1835 – August 13, 1882) was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher called Jevons's book, A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy (1862), the start of the mathematical method in economics. The book showed economics as a science of quantities requires mathematics. It explained the "final" (marginal) utility theory of value. Jevons's work, along with discoveries by Carl Menger in Vienna (1871) and Léon Walras in Switzerland (1874), started a new period in the

Edwin Thompson Jaynes (July 5, 1922 – April 30, 1998) served as the Wayman Crow Distinguished Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. Jaynes wrote much about statistical mechanics and the foundations of probability and statistical inference. In 1957, he started the maximum entropy interpretation of thermodynamics. This interpretation applied general Bayesian/information theory techniques to thermodynamics (though he argued this was already in Josiah Willard Gibbs's work). Jaynes strongly supported probability theory as an extension of logic. In 1963

Harold Hotelling (September 29, 1895 – December 26, 1973) was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist. He created Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics. He also established Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics. Hotelling developed and named the principal component analysis method used widely in finance, statistics, and computer science. He served as Associate Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University from 1927 to 1931. He joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1931 and remained there until 1946. He became a Professor of Mathematical Statistics.

Samarendra Nath Roy, or S. N. Roy (December 11, 1906 – July 23, 1964), was an Indian-born American mathematician and an applied statistician.

Karl Pearson (born Carl Pearson; March 27, 1857 – April 27, 1936) was an English mathematician and biostatistician. Pearson established the field of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College, London in 1911. Pearson also made big contributions to biometrics and meteorology. Pearson supported social Darwinism and eugenics. Pearson acted as a protégé and biographer for Sir Francis Galton. He edited and finished William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) and Is.

Agner Krarup Erlang (January 1, 1878 – February 3, 1929) was a Danish mathematician, statistician, and engineer. Erlang invented traffic engineering and queueing theory. Erlang created the field of telephone networks analysis before his early death at age 51. His early work studying local, exchange, and trunk telephone line use in a small community revealed the theoretical needs for an efficient network. This led to the Erlang formula, a foundation for modern telecommunication network studies.

Maurice Block (German: Moritz Block; February 18, 1816 – January 9, 1901) was a German-French statistician and economist. Block was born in Berlin to Jewish parents. He studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Heidelberg. He earned his doctorate from the University of Tübingen. In the mid-1840s, Block moved to Paris to work as a statistician for the French ministry of agriculture. In 1853, he moved to the General Statistic service. Starting in 1856, Block edited L'Annuaire de l'economie politique et de la statistique. He remained the editor until 1901. Block worked with many Fre

Paul Richard Halmos (Hungarian: Halmos Pál; March 3, 1916 – October 2, 2006) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician. Halmos made major advances in mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis, especially Hilbert spaces. He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor. People described Halmos as one of The Martians.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (February 8, 1845 – February 13, 1926) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist. He made major contributions to statistics methods during the 1880s. From 1891, he became the founding editor of The Economic Journal.

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962) was a British statistician and geneticist. People called him "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics." His work used math to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection. This work helped revive Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of evolution called the modern synthesis. Fisher's biology contributions earned him recognition.

Thomas M. Cover (August 7, 1938 – March 26, 2012) became an information theorist and professor at Stanford University, teaching in Electrical Engineering and Statistics. He spent nearly his whole career building the link between information theory and statistics.

Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll (October 28, 1912 – July 24, 2005) was a British physician. He became an epidemiologist mid-20th century, making key contributions to the field. Doll pioneered research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill, and Evarts Graham, he proved smoking causes lung cancer and raises heart disease risk. German studies suggested a link as early as the 1920s but these ideas were ignored until the 1990s. Doll also conducted pioneering work on the relationship between

Sir John Richard Nicholas Stone (August 30, 1913 – December 6, 1991) was an eminent British economist. Stone attended Westminster School and Cambridge University (Caius and King's). In 1984, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for creating an accounting model. This model tracked economic activities nationally and later internationally.

The Mars effect is a supposed statistical link between athletic skill and the position of Mars relative to the horizon at a person's birth time and place. French psychologist and "neo-astrologer" Michel Gauquelin first reported this finding in his 1955 book, L'influence des astres ("The Influence of the Stars"). Gauquelin suggested many sports champions were born just after Mars rose or peaked. Gauquelin split the ecliptic plane into twelve sectors, identifying two "key" sectors of s

Richard David Gill, born September 11, 1951, is a mathematician from the United Kingdom. He moved to the Netherlands in 1974. Gill, a probability theorist and statistician, gained fame for research on counting processes and survival analysis, some of which appears in an advanced textbook. Now retired, he chaired mathematical statistics at Leiden University. Gill also consults for free, advocating for victims of bad statistical testimony, including a Dutch nurse wrongly convicted and jailed for six years.

Gustav Theodor Fechner (German: [ˈfɛçnɐ]; 19 April 1801 – 18 November 1887) was a German philosopher, physicist, and experimental psychologist. He pioneered experimental psychology and founded psychophysics. Many 20th-century scientists and philosophers looked to him for inspiration. He showed the non-linear link between psychological sensation and stimulus intensity using the formula: S = K ln I, which became the Weber–Fechner law.

John Wilder Tukey (June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician. He developed the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and the box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller–Tukey lemma all use his name. Tukey also coined the term 'bit' and discovered flexagons.

Steven Haberman, born June 26, 1951, is the Director and Deputy Dean at Cass Business School. He is a Professor of Actuarial Science in the Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance. Haberman is the Founding Editor of the Journal of Pension, Economics and Finance. He studied at Ilford County High School, Trinity College, Cambridge (MA), and City University (PhD, DSc).

Bruno de Finetti (June 13, 1906 – July 20, 1985) was an Italian probabilist statistician and actuary. He was known for his "operational subjective" view of probability. His 1937 work, "La prévision: ses lois logiques, ses sources subjectives," explained probability based on betting odds and exchangeability.