Founders of Statistics

Life / Name / Famous for

• 801-873 / Abu Al-Kindi / statistical cryptography
• 1620-1674 / John Graunt / demography
• 1623-1687 / William Petty / estimation
• 1656-1742 / Edmund Halley / actuarial science
• 1667-1735 / John Arbuthnot / test of hypothesis of gender ratio
• 1700-1782 / Daniel Bernoulli / logarithmic utility
• 1701-1761 / Thomas Bayes / inverse probability
• 1710-1761 / Thomas Simpson / least deviation regression
• 1711-1787 / Roger Boscovich / least absolute deviations
• 1717-1783 / Pehr Wargentin / demography
• 1719-1722 / Gottfried Achenwall / coined German word Statistik
• 1723-1762 / Tobias Mayer / combining astronomical measurements
• 1723-1791 / Richard Price / demography
• 1749-1827 / Pierre-Simon Laplace / inverse probability, ratio estimation
• 1752-1833 / André-Marie Legendre / least squares
• 1768-1830 / Joseph Fourier / testing difference of two proportions
• 1777-1855 / Carl Friedrich Gauss / Gauss-Markov theorem, delta method
• 1784-1846 / Friedrich Bessel / probable error
• 1789-1857 / Augustin Louis Cauchy / minimizing largest error
• 1793-1859 / Lemuel Shattuck / public health
• 1796-1874 / Adolphe Quetelet / anthropometry
• 1802-1866 / André-Michel Guerry / criminal statistics, statistical graphics
• 1809-1890 / Jules Gavarret / fixed significance level testing in medicine
• 1811-1863 / Auguste Bravais / theoretical regression
• 1816-1894 / Theodor Wittstein / coined German term mathematische Statistik 1863
• 1820-1910 / Florence Nightingale / data visualization
• 1821-1883 / Louis-Adolphe Bertillon / demography
• 1822-1911 / Francis Galton / empirical regression
• 1835-1882 / Stanley Jevons / index numbers
• 1837-1914 / William Lexis / time series
• 1838-1910 / Thorvald Thiele / analysis of variance
• 1838-1919 / Anders Kiaer / survey sampling
• 1839-1914 / Charles Saunders Peirce / randomized experimentation
• 1857-1936 / Karl Pearson / chi-square test, P-value
• 1863-1945 / Charles Spearman / factor analysis
• 1871-1951 / Udny Yule / time series
• 1876-1937 / William Sealy Gosset / t-test
• 1878-1939 / Kirstine Smith / optimal design of experiments 1918
• 1878-1956 / Felix Bernstein / statistical analysis of blood group inheritance
• 1883-1953 / Richard von Mises / directional data
• 1884-1961 / Truman Kelley / coefficient of reliability
• 1884-1965 / Corrado Gini / index of inequality
• 1890-1962 / Ronald Fisher / likelihood, significance test
• 1891-1966 / Emil Julius Gumbel / statistics of extremes
• 1891-1967 / Walter Shewhart / quality control
• 1891-1983 / Helen Walker / history of statistical education
• 1891-1989 / Harold Jeffreys / Bayes factors
• 1892-1965 / Frank Wilcoxon / rank tests
• 1893-1972 / P. C. Mahalanobis / multivariate distance
• 1893-1985 / Harald Cramér / mathematical basis of statistics
• 1894-1981 / Jerzy Neyman / hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, spatial cluster models
• 1895-1933 / Lucien March / visualization of statistical distributions
• 1895-1973 / Harold Hotelling / confidence intervals
• 1895-1980 / Egon Pearson / hypothesis testing
• 1897-1883 / William Farr / statistical visualization, medical statistics
• 1897-1991 / Austin Bradford Hill / randomized clinical trials
• 1897-1993 / E.J.G. Pitman / invariant and equivariant estimators
• 1900-1978 / Gertrude Cox / experimental design
• 1900-1993 / W. Edwards Deming / quality control
• 1902-1950 / Abraham Wald / sequential analysis
• 1903-1987 / Andrei Kolmogorov / optimal estimation, time series
• 1906-1985 / Bruno de Finetti / Bayesian statistics
• 1908-1955 / Meyer Abraham Girschick / decision theory
• 1910-1990 / Morris Hansen / sampling
• 1911-1999 / Trygve Haavelmo / foundations of econometrics
• 1912-1954 / Alan Turing / cryptography
• 1912-1979 / Jerome Cornfield / clinical trials
• 1915-2000 / John Tukey / robust statistics, fast Fourier transform, exploratory data
• 1917-1971 / Leonard Jimmie Savage / Bayesian statistics
• 1917-1988 / Elizabeth Scott / spatial cluster models
• 1917-2009 / Erich Lehmann / testing
• 1919-2010 / David Blackwell / estimation, game theory
• 1919-2013 / George Box / time series
• 1919-2013 / Danie Krige / spatial estimation
• 1920-2016 / Charles Stein / shrinkage estimation
• 1920-now / C.R. Rao / optimal unbiased estimation
• 1923-2013 / Dennis Lindley / decision theory
• 1924-2000 / Lucien Le Cam / asymptotics
• 1924-2010 / John Nelder / generalized linear model
• 1924-2016 / Ingram Olkin / meta-analysis
• 1924-now / David Cox / proportional hazards
• 1926-1974 / Jaroslav Hájek / asymptotics
• 1927-2009 / Hirotugo Akaike / model selection
• 1930-2000 / Georges Matheron / geostatistics, mathematical morphology
• 1938-now / Bradley Efron / bootstrap
• 1945-2010 / Julian Besag / spatial lattice models
• 1947-1975 / Robert Wedderburn / generalized linear model