David Salsburg

Last updated

David S. Salsburg (born 1931) is an author. His 2002 book The Lady Tasting Tea , subtitled How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century, provides a layman's overview of important developments in the field of statistics in the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly in the areas of experiment design, the study of random distributions, and the careers of major researchers in the field such as Ronald Fisher, Karl Pearson, and Jerzy Neyman. [1]

Contents

Salsburg is a retired pharmaceutical company statistician (having been a senior research fellow at Pfizer's central research department until 1995) who has taught at Harvard, Yale, Connecticut College, the University of Connecticut, the University of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island College, and Trinity College [2] and has been a Fellow of the American Statistical Association since 1978. [3] In 1994, Salsburg was awarded the Career Achievement Award of the Biostatistics Section of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America , given annually for "significant contributions to the advancement of biostatistics in the pharmaceutical industry". [4] The Mathematical Association of America characterised him as follows

"Salsburg believes that the public is not fully aware of the degree to which recent developments in statistics impact the way we perceive the world. He correctly points out that the twentieth century saw the fading of a deterministic outlook and the rise of a statistical/probabilistic way of looking at the world. This ongoing revolution is not only in the physical sciences, it also touches the social sciences and even the humanities. Though profound, it is a quiet revolution that has been unnoticed by many." [5]

Salsburg's most recent book, Errors, Blunders and Lies: How to Tell the Difference was published in 2017. [6]

Publications

1. Understanding Randomness: Exercises for Statisticians (Lecture Notes in Statistics) (1983) [7]
2. Statistics for Toxicologists (Drug and Chemical Toxicology) (1986) [8]
3. The Use of Restricted Significance Tests in Clinical Trials (Statistics for Biology and Health) (1992) [9]
4. The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century (2002) [10]
5. When the Band has Ceased to Play, American Presidents after Leaving Office (2013) [11]
6. Jonah in the Garden of Eden: a statistical investigation of the Hebrew Bible (2013) [12]
7. Love Feeds Among the Lilies (2013) [13]
8. Errors, Blunders and Lies: How to Tell the Difference (ASA-CRC Series on Statistical Reasoning in Science and Society) (2017) [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Statistics</span> Study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data

Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.

A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data at hand sufficiently support a particular hypothesis. Hypothesis testing allows us to make probabilistic statements about population parameters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Persi Diaconis</span> American mathematician and statistician

Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Sealy Gosset</span> British statistician

William Sealy Gosset was an English statistician, chemist and brewer who served as Head Brewer of Guinness and Head Experimental Brewer of Guinness and was a pioneer of modern statistics. He pioneered small sample experimental design and analysis with an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. Gosset published under the pen name Student and developed most famously Student's t-distribution – originally called Student's "z" – and "Student's test of statistical significance".

George Waddel Snedecor was an American mathematician and statistician. He contributed to the foundations of analysis of variance, data analysis, experimental design, and statistical methodology. Snedecor's F-distribution and the George W. Snedecor Award of the American Statistical Association are named after him.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerzy Neyman</span> Polish American mathematician

Jerzy Neyman was a Polish mathematician and statistician who spent the first part of his professional career at various institutions in Warsaw, Poland and then at University College London, and the second part at the University of California, Berkeley. Neyman first introduced the modern concept of a confidence interval into statistical hypothesis testing and co-revised Ronald Fisher's null hypothesis testing.

<i>The Lady Tasting Tea</i> Book by David Salsburg about the history of modern statistics

The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century (ISBN 0-8050-7134-2) is a book by David Salsburg about the history of modern statistics and the role it played in the development of science and industry.


Stella Vivian Cunliffe was a British statistician. She was the first female president of the Royal Statistical Society.

Harry Clyde Carver was an American mathematician and academic, primarily associated with the University of Michigan. He was a major influence in the development of mathematical statistics as an academic discipline.

Samuel Stanley Wilks was an American mathematician and academic who played an important role in the development of mathematical statistics, especially in regard to practical applications.

In statistics, Kernel regression is a non-parametric technique to estimate the conditional expectation of a random variable. The objective is to find a non-linear relation between a pair of random variables X and Y.

Medical statistics deals with applications of statistics to medicine and the health sciences, including epidemiology, public health, forensic medicine, and clinical research. Medical statistics has been a recognized branch of statistics in the United Kingdom for more than 40 years but the term has not come into general use in North America, where the wider term 'biostatistics' is more commonly used. However, "biostatistics" more commonly connotes all applications of statistics to biology. Medical statistics is a subdiscipline of statistics. "It is the science of summarizing, collecting, presenting and interpreting data in medical practice, and using them to estimate the magnitude of associations and test hypotheses. It has a central role in medical investigations. It not only provides a way of organizing information on a wider and more formal basis than relying on the exchange of anecdotes and personal experience, but also takes into account the intrinsic variation inherent in most biological processes."

Statistics, in the modern sense of the word, began evolving in the 18th century in response to the novel needs of industrializing sovereign states. The evolution of statistics was, in particular, intimately connected with the development of European states following the peace of Westphalia (1648), and with the development of probability theory, which put statistics on a firm theoretical basis.

Florence Nightingale David, also known as F. N. David was an English statistician. She was head of the Statistics Department at the University of California, Riverside between 1970 – 77 and her research interests included the history of probability and statistical ideas.

Probability has a dual aspect: on the one hand the likelihood of hypotheses given the evidence for them, and on the other hand the behavior of stochastic processes such as the throwing of dice or coins. The study of the former is historically older in, for example, the law of evidence, while the mathematical treatment of dice began with the work of Cardano, Pascal, Fermat and Christiaan Huygens between the 16th and 17th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lady tasting tea</span> Famous randomized experiment

In the design of experiments in statistics, the lady tasting tea is a randomized experiment devised by Ronald Fisher and reported in his book The Design of Experiments (1935). The experiment is the original exposition of Fisher's notion of a null hypothesis, which is "never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation".

Janet Dixon Elashoff is a retired American statistician, formerly the director of biostatistics for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and professor of biomathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mavis Bowler Carroll was an American statistician who pioneered the industrial use of statistics in her work at General Foods.

Nancy Robbins Mann is an American statistician known for her research on quality management, reliability estimation, and the Weibull distribution.

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.

References

  1. ↑ "The Lady Tasting Tea". Archived from the original on 2012-09-29. Retrieved 2012-12-07.
  2. ↑ "Macmillan Books: Author: David Salsburg". Macmillan Publishers website. Retrieved 2009-12-13.
  3. ↑ View/Search Fellows of the ASA Archived 2016-06-16 at the Wayback Machine , accessed 2016-08-20.
  4. ↑ "Dr. Salsburg gets award". The Day (New London) . The Day Publishing Company. 1994-12-29. p. 1. Retrieved 2010-07-27.
  5. ↑ Mehlman, Marc. H (2003-03-25). "Read This! The MAA Online book review column: The Lady Tasting Tea by David Salsburg". MAA Online. Mathematical Association of America . Retrieved 2009-05-16.
  6. ↑ Salsburg, David (2017). Errors, Blunders and Lies:: How to Tell the Difference. ISBN   978-1498795784.
  7. ↑ Salsburg (27 September 1983). Understanding Randomness. ISBN   0824770579.
  8. ↑ Salsburg (29 May 1986). Statistics for Toxicologists. ISBN   0824775902.
  9. ↑ Salsburg, David (6 August 1992). Restricted Significance Tests in Clinical Trials. ISBN   0387977988.
  10. ↑ Salsburg, David (May 2002). The Lady Tasting Tea. ISBN   0805071342.
  11. ↑ "When the Band has Ceased to Play, American Presidents after Leaving Office".
  12. ↑ "Jonah in the Garden of Eden".
  13. ↑ Salsburg, David S. (December 2013). Love Feeds Among the Lilies. ISBN   978-1612962863.
  14. ↑ Salsburg, David (2017). Errors, Blunders and Lies: How to Tell the Difference (ASA-CRC Series on Statistical Reasoning in Science and Society). ISBN   978-1498795784.


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.