Ten Statisticians and their Impacts for Psychologists

Dan Wright has written an article about Ten statisticians and their impacts for psychologists, which is well worth reading. As psychologists, we learn about, and use statistics, but we don't learn enough (in my opinion) about the historical and philosophical underpinnings - which are linked to the individuals - how many psychologists know that Fisher and Pearson did not get on, for example.

As well as describing these statisticians early work, he gives some snippets of details about their lives - I didn't know, for example, that Jerzy Neyman had ever been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution (it's Neyman that we can thank for people using 0.05 as a stringent cutoff).

Two snippets he didn't mention - perhaps for lack of space. He mentions that there are only four females in a list of 100 prominent statisticians - but one of these (F N David) is named after one of the others (Florence Nightingale). In addition, he mentions Ronald Fisher (obviously), George Box, and Fisher's daughter, Joan Fisher Box (who wrote Fisher's biography), but does not mention that Joan Fisher Box acquired her name (you know where this is going, don't you) by marrying George Box.

I've also heard it said that George Box and David Cox knew each other for a long time, and thought it would be cool to publish a paper together - but they worked in very different areas. Eventually they did publish one on a method for transformations, now known as Box-Cox transformations, and sometimes just called Box-Coxing, as in "Have you tried Box-Coxing that dataset?" If anyone had any confirmation that it was true, I'd be interested.