Barbara Falkenbach Ryan

Last updated

Barbara Falkenbach Ryan is an American mathematician, computer scientist, statistician and business executive. She is known for developing the Minitab statistical software package, and for being president and CEO of Minitab, Inc.

Contents

Education and early career

Ryan earned her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1968 at Cornell University, studying recursion theory under the supervision of Anil Nerode. Her dissertation was ω-Cohesive Sets. [1] [2] Nerode writes that, although Ryan moved away from this subject "immediately after her degree", Nerode still found her thesis work to be original and worth publishing many years later, and was able to persuade Ryan to publish the work in a journal by threatening to hold back a letter of reference for her. [3]

Soon after completing their doctorates, Ryan and her then-husband, statistician and fellow Cornell graduate Thomas A. Ryan Jr. (1940–2017) [2] [3] [4] found positions at Pennsylvania State University. She joined the computer science department at Penn State, and published research on a more applied topic, I/O scheduling. [5]

Minitab

In 1972, Thomas Ryan and another Penn State statistics instructor, Brian L. Joiner, first began developing Minitab, with the consultation of Barbara Ryan. In 1974, Joiner left Penn State and Barbara Ryan joined Thomas Ryan as one of the Minitab developers. [6]

In 1983 the Ryans spun off their software into a company, Minitab, Inc. [7] In 1988, Barbara Ryan and her husband divorced, her husband left Minitab, [4] and Ryan became president and chief executive officer of the company. [8]

As originally formulated, Minitab was primarily used for engineering applications and statistical education. In the late 1990s, Ryan chose to focus Minitab more towards Six Sigma business process improvement. The software became the market leader in this area, and this change spurred significant growth for the company. [9]

Service and recognition

Ryan chaired the Statistical Computing Section of the American Statistical Association in 1984. [10] In 1990, the association named Ryan as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minitab</span> Statistics software

Minitab is a statistics package developed at the Pennsylvania State University by researchers Barbara F. Ryan, Thomas A. Ryan, Jr., and Brian L. Joiner in conjunction with Triola Statistics Company in 1972. It began as a light version of OMNITAB, a statistical analysis program by National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Anil Nerode is an American mathematician, known for his work in mathematical logic and for his many-decades tenure as a professor at Cornell University.

Statistics is the theory and application of mathematics to the scientific method including hypothesis generation, experimental design, sampling, data collection, data summarization, estimation, prediction and inference from those results to the population from which the experimental sample was drawn. Statisticians are skilled people who thus apply statistical methods. Hundreds of statisticians are notable. This article lists statisticians who have been especially instrumental in the development of theoretical and applied statistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bin Yu</span> Chinese-American statistician

Bin Yu is a Chinese-American statistician. She is currently Chancellor's Professor in the Departments of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hadley Wickham</span> New Zealand statistician

Hadley Alexander Wickham is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit, PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. His work includes the data visualisation system ggplot2 and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages for data science based on the concept of tidy data.

Nicole Alana Lazar is a statistician who holds triple citizenship as an American, Canadian, and Israeli. She is a professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University. Previously she was a professor at the University of Georgia, where she was interim Department Head of the statistics department from 2014 to 2016. Her research interests include empirical likelihood, functional neuroimaging, model selection and the history and sociology of statistics.

Heike Hofmann is a statistician and Professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University.

Karen Kafadar is an American statistician. She is Commonwealth Professor of Statistics at the University of Virginia, and chair of the statistics department there. She was editor-in-chief of Technometrics from 1999 to 2001, and was president of the International Association for Statistical Computing for 2011–2013. In 2017 she was elected president of the American Statistical Association for the 2019 term.

Barbara Ann Bailar was an American statistician, who worked for many years at the United States Census Bureau but resigned in protest over the decision not to adjust its 1990 results. She was the only person to have been both president and executive director of the American Statistical Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizaveta Levina</span> Russian and American mathematical statistician

Elizaveta (Liza) Levina is a Russian and American mathematical statistician. She is the Vijay Nair Collegiate Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan, and is known for her work in high-dimensional statistics, including covariance estimation, graphical models, statistical network analysis, and nonparametric statistics.

Naomi Altman is a statistician known for her work on kernel smoothing[KS] and kernel regression,[KR] and interested in applications of statistics to gene expression and genomics. She is a professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University, and a regular columnist for the "Points of Significance" column in Nature Methods.

Naomi Robbins, also known by her initials NBR, is an American statistician, expert in data visualization, graphical data presentation consultant and author. She is the author of Creating More Effective Graphs, a reference book on the graphical representation of data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan R. Rosenblatt</span> American statistician

Joan Raup Rosenblatt was an American statistician who became Director of the Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She was president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics in 1976.

Aparna V. Huzurbazar is an American statistician known for her work using graphical models to understand time-to-event data. She is the author of a book on this subject, Flowgraph Models for Multistate Time-to-Event Data.

Joanne Roth Wendelberger is an American statistician and a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Jiayang Sun is an American statistician whose research has included work on simultaneous confidence bands for multiple comparisons, selection bias, mixture models, Gaussian random fields, machine learning, big data, statistical computing, graphics, and applications in biostatistics, biomedical research, software bug tracking, astronomy, and intellectual property law. She is a statistics professor, Bernard J. Dunn Eminent Scholar, and chair of the statistics department at George Mason University, and a former president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics.

Beth L. Chance is an American statistics educator. She is a professor of statistics at the California Polytechnic State University.

Bakhadyr M. Khoussainov is a computer scientist and mathematician, who was born and educated in the Soviet Union, works in the fields of mathematical logic, computability theory, computable model theory and theoretical computer science. With Anil Nerode, he is the co-founder of the theory of automatic structures, which is an extension of the theory of automatic groups.

Olga Vitek is a biostatistician and computer scientist specializing in bioinformatics, proteomics, mass spectrometry, causal inference of biological function, and the development of open-source software for statistical analysis in these areas. She is a professor in the College of Science and Khoury College of Computer Sciences of Northeastern University.


Elizabeth Mannshardt is an American environmental statistician, professor, and government executive. She is the Associate Director of the Information Access and Analytic Services Division at the United States Environmental Protection Agency and an adjunct associate professor in the department of statistics at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on climate change and extremes in climate and weather.

References

  1. ↑ Barbara Falkenbach Ryan at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. 1 2 Cornell Mathematics Doctorates, 1960–1969, Cornell University Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2019-01-29
  3. 1 2 Nerode, Anil (1999), Autobiography: My Life at Cornell , retrieved 2019-01-29
  4. 1 2 "Thomas "Tom" A. Ryan, Jr.", Memorial Minutes, 2018 Yearbook, Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, retrieved 2019-01-29
  5. ↑ Coffman, E. G.; Klimko, L. A.; Ryan, Barbara (September 1972), "Analysis of scanning policies for reducing disk seek times", SIAM Journal on Computing , 1 (3): 269–279, doi:10.1137/0201018
  6. ↑ Ryan, Thomas A.; Joiner, Brian L.; Ryan, Barbara F. (August 15, 2006), "Minitab", Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences, Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1002/0471667196.ess1647.pub2
  7. ↑ Harkness, William; Hettmansperger, Thomas; Lin, Dennis; Rosenberger, James (2013), "Penn State University Department of Statistics", in Agresti, Alan; Meng, Xiao-Li (eds.), Strength in Numbers: The Rising of Academic Statistics Departments in the U. S., New York: Springer, pp. 199–214, doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3649-2_15
  8. ↑ Alin, Aylin (September 2010), "Minitab", Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics, 2 (6): 723–727, doi:10.1002/wics.113, S2CID   247700343
  9. ↑ Wilkinson, Leland (November 2008), "The Future of Statistical Computing", Technometrics, 50 (4): 418–435, doi:10.1198/004017008000000460, JSTOR   25471520, S2CID   3521989
  10. ↑ Chambers, John M.; Ryan, Barbara F. (May 1990), "The ASA Statistical Computing Section: A History", The American Statistician, 44 (2): 87–89, doi:10.2307/2684135, JSTOR   2684135
  11. ↑ View/Search Fellows of the ASA, American Statistical Association, archived from the original on 2019-04-25, retrieved 2019-01-29
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.