Reminiscences of a Statistician

This relatively nontechnical book is the first account of the history of statistics from the Fisher revolution to the computer revolution. It sketches the careers, and highlights some of the work, of 65 people, most of them statisticians. What gives the book its special character is its emphasis on the author's interaction with these people and the inclusion of many personal anecdotes. Combined, these portraits provide an amazing fly-on-the-wall view of statistics during the period in question. The stress is on ideas and technical material is held to a minimum. Thus the book is accessible to anyone with at least an elementary background in statistics.

Erich L. Lehmann is Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the American and National Academies, a former Editor of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics , and President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Chicago and Leiden, and was awarded the Wilks and Noether prizes. He is also the author of Testing Statistical Hypotheses, Theory of Point Estimation, and Elements of Large-Sample Theory, all published by Springer. Two more elementary books, Basic Concepts of Probability and Statistics (joint with Hodges) and Nonparametrics have recently been reissued by SIAM and Springer, respectively.

Auteur
Erich L. Lehmann is Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the American and National Academies, a former Editor of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics, and President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Chicago and Leiden, and was awarded the Wilks and Noether prizes. He is also the author of Testing Statistical Hypotheses, Theory of Point Estimation, and Elements of Large-Sample Theory, all published by Springer. Two more elementary books, Basic Concepts of Probability and Statistics (joint with Hodges) and Nonparametrics have recently been reissued by SIAM and Springer, respectively.

Résumé
It has been my good fortune to meet and get to know many remarkable people, mostly statisticians and mathematicians, and to derive much pleasure and benefit from these contacts. They were teachers, colleagues and students, and the following pages sketch their careers and our interactions. Also included are a few persons with whom I had little or no direct contact but whose ideas had a decisive influence on my work. To provide some coherence, the account is largely chronological and follows the steps of my own career. Taken together, these sketches provide a very personal picture of the dev- opment of statistical theory from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is the period between two revolutions: that of Fisher, Neyman, and Pearson, which laid the foundations for the classical statistical theory of that period; and the second revolution, forty years later, brought about by the advent of the computer, which turned statistics in new directions. The present account of this history is a highly selective one, which emphasizes the persons, institutions, and statistical topics that were close to my interests. One narrowing effect of this perspective stems from the fact that my career took place in the United States. As a consequence, the book focuses on American statisticians and institutions. Only the last two ch- ters discuss, briefly and very incompletely, developments in some other countries.

Contenu
Mathematical Preparation.- Becoming a Statistician.- Early Collaborators.- Mathematical Statistics at Other Universities.- The Annals.- The Berkeley Statistics Department I: Establishment and First Generation.- The Berkeley Statistics Department II: The Second Generation.- The Stanford Statistics Department.- Nonparametrics and Robustness.- Foundations I: The Frequentist Approach.- Foundations II: Bayesianism and Data Analysis.- Statistics Comes of Age.- New Tasks and Relationships.- England.- Contacts Abroad.