Historical Information on Statistics and Quality

"The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see." - Sir Winston S. Churchill

George E.P. Box (1919 -)

• Some Problems of Statistics and Everyday Life (1978) - Presidential address to the American Statistical Association.

Sir R.A. Fisher (1890 - 1962)

Note: The papers listed here are a subset of those available on the University of Adelaide website. I have chosen those which may be of most interest to quality practitioners, though encourage the interested reader to visit the full list of available statistical papers, accessible by clicking here.

• Student (1939) - contains a very readable discussion of the derivation and importance of the t-test.
• Recent Progress in Experimental Design (1945) - excellent discussion of general principles, including randomization and  replication.
• Development of the Theory of Experimental Design (1947) - strong words on the importance of randomization.
• The Place of the Design of Experiments in the Logic of Scientific Inference (1962) - I recommend section III in particular (the first sentence is a classic).

William S. Gosset, a.k.a."Student" (1876 - 1937)

• The Probable Error of a Mean (1908) - The paper that introduced what we now call the t-test. The introduction to the paper alone is worth reading.
• "Student" and Small-Sample Theory (1999) - Discussion on the influence of Gosset on several pioneers of statistical methods in the 20th Century.

Also worth reading is "Student's" contribution to the exchange of letters between E.S. Pearson and R.A. Fisher in the reviews to Fisher's Statistical Methods for Research Workers. For the text click here.

Jerzy Neyman (1894 - 1981) with E.S. Pearson (1895 - 1980)

• On the Problem of the Most Efficient Tests of Statistical Hypotheses (1933) - One of the most important papers in modern statistics - providing the framework for many inferential approaches in current use. Note that you will need to enter 289 in the box that says "Aller page" i.e. "go to page" and click enter, then use the forward button to move through the pages. For more information on this paper see the section HYPOTHESIS and HYPOTHESIS TESTING after clicking here. Warning: this is a highly technical mathematical paper.

Walter A. Shewhart (1891 - 1967)

• The Advancing Statistical Front (1946) - Presidential address to the American Statistical Association . Notice the marked similarity on the role of the statistician in the section "Three Types of Scientific Research" to George Box's address.

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