My Idols

Here are two of my most respected statisticians. You can say that the entire statistics literature builds on the work by Karl Pearson and Fisher's family.

























Karl Pearson


























Sir R.A Fisher

Ironically, two of them disliked each other...

"Fisher and young Pearson(Karl Pearson's son) did not have a good personal relationship. This was entirely Fisher's fault. He treated Egon Pearson with obvious hostility. This gentle man suffered Fisher's dislike of his father and from Fisher's further dislike of Jerzy Neyman, whose collaboration with Egon Pearson will be described in chapter 10. However, young Pearson was most respectful of and had high regard for Fisher's work. In later years, he wrote that he had long since gotten used to Fisher's never having mentioned his name in print."

"A philosophical difference separated Karl Pearson's approach to distributions from that Fisher's. Karl Pearson viewed statistical distributions as describing the actual collections of data he would analyze. According to Fisher, the true distribution is an abstract mathematical formula, and the data collected can be used only to estimate the parameters of the true distribution."

"In the 1930s, Fisher appeared to have won the argument. In the 1970s, the Pearsonian view made a come back."

It's fun to read the history of statistics, you look at those genius' research work. Sir Fisher published 3 paper in around 5 years. When people look at his work, they are all suprised by the amount of calculations he did. For one single table in one paper which contains 15 equally long and complex tables, people estimated that it would take one people to finish it in around nine months' time--assuming 6 working days and 12 hours per day. I cannot imagine it. Anyway, genius are only for people to admire... =)

To anyone who is interested in statistics, or I would say, anyone interested in biology, biochemistry research, you should seriously take a look at this book. "The Lady Tasting Tea"

This is one of the most exciting statistics book that I have read-- it explained the concepts, the history of statistics, the application in biology, in genetics and etc. And the best thing about this book is, it's all short stories-- with no formula, no graph... It's just the characters in this book are really limited. You will see Pearson and Fisher's name every where. Not only the two old men, but their family members as well.. Gosh

Can you imagine a family with 5 or more statisticians? I guess the family gathering will be really fun! haha so I was thinking, if I marry a statistician, then most probably my children will all be statisticians... OMG... Anyway, it's good to have a dream. Even though the dream of being a statistician isn't as pleasant as being a rich tai tai I guess.

Labels: Sexy Stats

posted by panda xuan @ 1:22 AM