Explicit cookie consent | The Economist

/21636589-how-statisticians-changed-war-

  • Devenu statisticien par pure coïncidence...

    cc @simplicissimus

    http://flowingdata.com/2012/04/06/the-accidental-statistician

    George E.P. Box, a statistician known for his body of work in time series analysis and Bayesian inference (and his quotes), recounts how he became a statistician while trying to solve actual problems. He was a 19-year-old college student studying chemistry. Instead of finishing, he joined the army, fed up with what the British government was doing to stop Hitler.

    Before I could actually do any of that I was moved to a highly secret experimental station in the south of England. At the time they were bombing London every night and our job was to help to find out what to do if, one night, they used poisonous gas.

    Some of England’s best scientists were there. There were a lot of experiments with small animals, I was a lab assistant making biochemical determinations, my boss was a professor of physiology dressed up as a colonel, and I was dressed up as a staff sergeant.

    The results I was getting were very variable and I told my colonel that what we really needed was a statistician.

    He said “we can’t get one, what do you know about it?” I said “Nothing, I once tried to read a book about it by someone called R. A. Fisher but I didn’t understand it”. He said “You’ve read the book so you better do it”, so I said, “Yes sir”.

    –— ---

    Statisticians in World War II: They also served | The Economist

    http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636589-how-statisticians-changed-war-and-war-changed-statistics-they-al

    “I BECAME a statistician because I was put in prison,” says Claus Moser. Aged 92, he can look back on a distinguished career in academia and civil service: he was head of the British government statistical service in 1967-78 and made a life peer in 2001. But statistics had never been his plan. He had dreamed of being a pianist and when he realised that was unrealistic, accepted his father’s advice that he should study commerce and manage hotels. (“He thought I would like the music in the lobby.”)

    War threw these plans into disarray. In 1936, aged 13, he fled Germany with his family; four years later the prime minister, Winston Churchill, decided that because some of the refugees might be spies, he would “collar the lot”. Lord Moser was interned in Huyton, near Liverpool (pictured above). “If you lock up 5,000 Jews we will find something to do,” he says now. Someone set up a café; there were lectures and concerts—and a statistical office run by a mathematician named Landau. One day Lord Moser sat with him at lunch. By the meal’s end he had agreed to be the mathematician’s assistant—and found his vocation.

    #statistiques #histoire