List of eminent statisticians

This list of important statisticians represents a selection of statisticians from the 17th century to the present day. The selection of statisticians is based on their scientific achievements or their level of awareness. Since statistics are on the one hand in the area of ​​tension between mathematics and the applied sciences and on the other hand scientists often worked in many scientific disciplines in the past, many statisticians come from very different disciplines or application areas.

image	Name (life data)	Research area
	Gottfried Achenwall * October 20, 1719 in Elbing † May 1, 1772 in Göttingen	Gottfried Achenwall is considered to be one of the fathers of statistics because he gave it a scientific character with his work "Outline of the newest political science of the most distinguished European empires and republics" from 1749. By statistics he did not mean, of course, what is meant by this term today but an extensive description of the social, political and economic characteristics of a state.
	Thomas Bayes * around 1702 in London † April 17, 1761 in Tunbridge Wells	Thomas Bayes was an English mathematician and Presbyterian pastor. According to him, which is Bayes' theorem named, the great in probability meaning. In doing so, he laid the foundation for a special branch of statistics: Bayesian statistics .
	Jacques Bertin * 1918 in Maisons-Laffitte, † May 3, 2010	Jacques Bertin was an important cartographer who was the first to write a standard work on graphic theory and visualization in general with his book Sémiologie graphique in 1967.
	David Cox * July 15, 1924 in Birmingham	Sir David Roxbee Cox is a British statistician. In 1972 he developed the Cox regression named after him . It is used to model survival times in survival time analysis and is based on the concept of the hazard rate .
	Carl Friedrich Gauß * April 30, 1777 in Braunschweig † February 23, 1855 in Göttingen	Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß was a German mathematician, astronomer, geodesist and physicist with a wide range of interests. Since Gauss published only a fraction of his discoveries, posterity did not understand the depth and scope of his work until his diary was discovered and evaluated in 1898. At eighteen he found the least squares method and this later led him to the Gaussian bell curve ( normal distribution ).
	Francis Edgeworth * February 8, 1845 in Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland † February 13, 1926 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England	Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was an Irish economist. The Edgeworth development is named after him, which represents the characteristic function of a probability distribution as a series development of its cumulants . In contrast to the Gram-Charlier series expansion, the error of the Edgeworth expansion can be better controlled.
	Bradley Efron * May 1938 in St. Paul, Minnesota	Bradley Efron is an American statistician. The bootstrapping method he found in 1979 allows the variability of a test statistic to be estimated non-parametrically . Other contributions from him deal with the empirical Bayesian method, with high-dimensional multiple testing, with variable selection and model selection as well as with geometric aspects of statistical inference .
	Bruno de Finetti born June 13, 1906 in Innsbruck; † July 20, 1985 in Rome	Bruno de Finetti was an Italian mathematician. He rejected the assumption that probabilities exist objectively. Instead, he developed the theory of subjective probability independently of Frank Ramsey . Furthermore, he dealt with random variables that can be exchanged (or permutable ) in the order .
	Ronald Fisher * February 17, 1890 in London, England † July 29, 1962 in Adelaide, Australia	Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was one of the most important theoretical biologists, geneticists, evolutionists and statisticians of the 20th century. He led the maximum likelihood principle , the analysis of variance ( English variance analysis of , in short, ANOVA ) and the p-value one. He made significant contributions to the statistical design of experiments and postulated the estimation-theoretical concepts of sufficiency , freedom of distribution and Fisher information .
	Francis Galton * February 16, 1822 in Sparkbrook, Birmingham † January 17, 1911 in Haslemere, Surrey	Sir Francis Galton was a British naturalist and writer. In order to give his investigations empirical information, he developed the correlation coefficient together with his friend Karl Pearson , pioneered the use of normal distribution in the 1870s and 1880s and discovered regression towards the center . He also developed the Galton board , a model for demonstrating probability distributions .
	William Gosset (student) born June 13, 1876 in Canterbury † October 16, 1937 in Beaconsfield	William Sealy Gosset was an English statistician who published almost all of his work under the pseudonym "Student". Its greatest achievement, the t-distribution , is therefore known as the Student's t-distribution . It was Ronald Aylmer Fisher who saw the importance of Gosset's work on small sample sizes.
	John Graunt * April 24, 1620 in London † April 18, 1674 in London	John Graunt made a significant contribution to the systematic collection and evaluation of data and is considered to be an important pioneer of modern statistics and the founder of demography. Together with William Petty , he developed early statistical and census methods. In 1662 he calculated the first mortality table and for the first time indicated the probability of survival for every age. He is also seen as one of the first experts in the field of epidemiology.
	Andrei Nikolajewitsch Kolmogorow * April 25, 1903 in Tambov † October 20, 1987 in Moscow	Andrei Nikolajewitsch Kolmogorow was one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century. He first published on probability theory in the early twenties . In 1933 Kolmogorov's textbook Basic Concepts of Probability Theory was published in German by Springer-Verlag in Heidelberg, in which he presented his axiomatization of probability theory .
	Pierre-Simon Laplace * March 28, 1749 in Beaumont-en-Auge in Normandy † March 5, 1827 in Paris	Pierre-Simon (Marquis de) Laplace was a French mathematician and astronomer. His second major area of ​​research was probability . In his two-volume work Théorie Analytique des Probabilités (1812), Laplace gave a definition of probability and dealt with dependent and independent events, especially those related to gambling. He also covered expected value, mortality, and life expectancy in the book. The work represented a refutation of the thesis that a strict mathematical treatment of probability is not possible. Two years later the book Essai philosophique sur des Probabilités was published, written for a wide readership.
	Richard von Mises * April 19, 1883 in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary † July 14, 1953 in Boston, Massachusetts	Richard Edler von Mises was an Austrian mathematician. His main areas of work were numerical mathematics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, statistics and probability theory . In his work The Basis of Probability Calculation , published in 1919, he tried to define probability using the analytical concept of limit values.
	Abraham de Moivre * May 26, 1667 in Vitry-le-François † November 27, 1754 in London	Abraham de Moivre was a French mathematician. From 1708 he dealt with studies of probability theory based on gambling calculations , from which the Doctrine of Chances - a method for calculating the probabilities of events in play , published in 1718 - emerged . After the discovery of the limit theorem for binomial distributions (1733), the second edition (1738) found an objective concept of probability . The third edition, published posthumously in 1756, also contained his research on mortality and pension problems. The book was one of the most important preliminary stages for the textbook of probability theory by Pierre Simon Laplace .
	Jerzy Neyman * April 16, 1894 in Bendery, Moldova † August 5, 1981 in Oakland, California	Jerzy Neyman was a Polish mathematician and author of important statistical books. After lectures by Sergei Natanowitsch Bernstein , he dealt with probability theory as a student . In London he met Egon Pearson , with whom he worked closely in the period that followed. The Neyman-Pearson lemma is named after them.
	Karl Pearson * March 27, 1857 in London † April 27, 1936 in Coldharbour, Surrey	Karl Pearson was a British mathematician. His scientific contributions to statistics made Pearson popular: the correlation coefficient , the moment method , the principal component analysis and the chi-square test . He is also considered one of the great early pioneers of psychology.
	Egon Pearson * August 11, 1895 in Hampstead † June 12, 1980 London	Egon Sharpe Pearson was a British statistician and the son of Karl Pearson. The Neyman-Pearson lemma was named after him.
	William Playfair * September 22, 1759 near Dundee, Scotland † February 11, 1823	William Playfair was a Scottish engineer and economist who made significant contributions to the development of information graphics. He published his Commercial and Political Atlas in London in 1786 , which contained 43 time series analyzes and the first known bar chart . Playfairs Statistical Breviary (London, 1801) contains the first known pie chart .
	Adolphe Quételet * February 22, 1796 in Ghent † February 17, 1874 in Brussels	Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quételet was a Belgian astronomer and statistician. His work in the State Statistical Office and his acquaintance with the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace aroused Quetelet's interest in the calculation of probability . He tried to fathom both the physical and the moral phenomena of individual and community life through statistics . A study of the distribution of chest measurements in 5,738 Scottish soldiers resulted in a normal distribution . In 1846 he organized the first census in Belgium.
	Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao * September 10, 1920 in Hadagali, Karnataka	Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao is an Indian mathematician. Rao is one of the most internationally renowned statisticians and proved, among other things, the Cramér-Rao inequality and the Rao-Blackwell theorem .
	Pafnuty Chebyshev * May 16, 1821 in the village of Okatowo † December 8, 1894 in Saint Petersburg	Pafnuti Lwowitsch Chebyshev was an important Russian mathematician of the 19th century. In 1846 he defended his master's thesis, An Attempt at Elementary Analysis of Probability Theory . The Chebyshev inequality and Chebyshev's theorem are named after him . Chebyshev also worked in the fields of interpolation, approximation theory, function theory, number theory, mechanics and ballistics.
	Edward Tufte * March 14, 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri	Edward Rolf Tufte is an American information scientist and graphic designer. He coined the term "chart junk" to identify useless, information-less or information-obscuring components of overviews. He developed sparklines , a graphic method to illustrate changes and trends in a space-saving manner. He became known to wider circles for his criticism of PowerPoint .
	John Tukey * June 16, 1915 in New Bedford, Massachusetts † July 26, 2000 in New Brunswick (New Jersey)	John Wilder Tukey was an American statistician. He is considered the founder of exploratory data analysis and is known for several methods of graphical data analysis in statistics ( Box and Whisker Plot , Stem and Leaf Diagram , Tukey's Paired Comparisons and others). The term bit was probably proposed by him in 1946 and he coined the term software in 1958 .
	Waloddi Weibull * June 18, 1887 † October 12, 1979 in Annecy	Ernst Hjalmar Waloddi Weibull was a Swedish engineer and mathematician. His best-known research is concerned with the Weibull distribution named after him , which has proven to be very useful in connection with issues such as material fatigue in brittle bodies, the failure of electronic components or in statistical studies of wind speeds.
	Frank Wilcoxon * September 2, 1892 in County Cork, Ireland † November 18, 1965 in Tallahassee, Florida	Frank Wilcoxon was an American chemist who was particularly concerned with the development of methods for the statistical analysis of scientific data. In 1945, Biometrics Bulletin published a description of the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test and Wilcoxon signed rank test under the title Individual Comparisons by Ranking Methods . They are the most common nonparametric tests used to compare two samples.

Statisticians timeline

literature

• Norman L. Johnson, Eric Ed. Johnson: Leading Personalities in Statistical Sciences: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present . Wiley, London 1997, ISBN 0-471-16381-3 .