Cross-posted to Crooked Timber
Via everyone in the profession: the statistician Frederick Mosteller has died. Mosteller was one of the great leaders of the generation of statisticians in which our field went from being an annex of mathematics (as it was when he attended Carnegie Tech) to an autonomous, institutionalized discipline. He had an astonishing range as a researcher, but is perhaps best known for his work on stochastic theories of learning theory and the authorship of the Federalist Papers. He was also a notable teacher, as his essay "Classroom and Platform Performance" suggests, and in the later part of his career tried to bring elementary inferential hygenie to educational research. More anecdotes are available from Tales of the Statisticians, or this brief sketch by his student Stephen Fienberg.
Posted at July 28, 2006 09:42 | permanent link