History • People • Ideas
The People Behind
the Methods
Short, readable profiles of the statisticians whose ideas still run the field -- their lives, their feuds, and what their work actually changed. Lighter reading than the Articles library: no derivations, just the people.
How This Works
A new bio goes up about once a week. Ronald Fisher's bio is free for everyone, registered or not -- every bio after that is free to read for signed-up (Registered) and Paid accounts. That's a permanent policy, not a rotating preview.
Ronald Fisher
Statistician & Geneticist1890–1962
Ronald Fisher built the vocabulary of modern statistics -- ANOVA, the p-value, randomized experimental design, maximum likelihood -- while working through decades of messy crop-trial data at Rothamsted, then went on to help found population genetics with The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. This bio also covers what the field doesn't always mention in the same breath: his sustained public campaign for eugenics, his feuds with Karl Pearson and with Neyman and Egon Pearson, and his late-career, tobacco-industry-funded dispute of the link between smoking and cancer.
Thomas Bayes
Minister & Mathematicianc. 1701–1761
Thomas Bayes published nothing on probability during his lifetime. The essay that made him famous -- An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances -- was found among his papers after his death and submitted to the Royal Society by his friend Richard Price in 1763. This bio covers what little is known of his life as a Tunbridge Wells minister, his anonymous defense of Newton's calculus, and how Laplace and later Poincaré turned his single posthumous essay into the foundation of Bayesian inference -- plus the widely reproduced portrait of him that almost certainly isn't him at all.
Abraham de Moivre
Mathematician1667–1754
Exiled from France as a Huguenot and never granted a university post in England, Abraham de Moivre supported himself as a private tutor while producing some of the era's most consequential mathematics: the normal approximation to the binomial distribution (an early form of the central limit theorem), de Moivre's formula linking complex numbers and trigonometry, and the mathematical foundations of life-annuity pricing. This bio covers his friendship with Newton, his role judging the Newton-Leibniz calculus dispute, and the famous story of him predicting his own death from an arithmetic progression in his sleep patterns.
Jacob Bernoulli
Mathematician1655–1705
Working largely in private against his family's wishes, Jacob Bernoulli proved what he called his 'golden theorem' -- now the law of large numbers -- giving probability theory a rigorous foundation for the first time. This bio also covers his bitter, public feud with his own brother Johann over calculus priority, his other foundational work on infinite series and the Bernoulli numbers, and the posthumous publication of his masterwork Ars Conjectandi in 1713, eight years after his death, alongside the famous mistake stonemasons made carving his tombstone's logarithmic spiral.
Christiaan Huygens
Mathematician & Astronomer1629–1695
In 1655, on a visit to Paris, Christiaan Huygens heard secondhand about Pascal and Fermat's private letters on gambling problems -- and went home to write De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, the first printed book on probability theory and the only one in circulation for the next fifty years. This bio also covers the rest of a genuinely wide-ranging career: discovering Saturn's moon Titan and the true shape of its rings, inventing the pendulum clock, proposing the wave theory of light, and, in his final years, publicly rejecting Isaac Newton's theory of gravity as 'absurd.'
Blaise Pascal
Mathematician & Philosopher1623–1662
In the summer of 1654, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat exchanged five letters working out how to fairly divide the stakes of an interrupted gambling game -- the correspondence usually credited as the birth of probability theory. This bio also covers the Pascaline mechanical calculator he built as a teenager, his law of hydrostatic pressure, the religious conversion that turned him away from mathematics almost entirely, and Pascal's Wager, the piece of expected-value reasoning he built out of the same probabilistic thinking that founded his mathematical legacy.