#OTD 1881 Hilda Hudson b (d 26 Nov 1965)🇬🇧 OBE. Best known to statisticians for developing the classic SIR model of epidemic infectious disease with Ronald Ross 1916-17 she also pioneered application of sophisticated mathematics to aeronautical engineering. 1/5 ImageImage
2/ She was the first ever female invited speaker at International Congress of Mathematicians 1912 where she read a paper on curved surfaces. Semple called her “a distinguished mathematician of great erudition and integrity”. The paper read at the Congr...
3/ During WWI, she joined the Admiralty to head the Structural Analysis section. With Letitia Chitty (1897-1982) & Beatrice Cave-Browne-Cave (1874-1947) they revolutionised fixed-wing aircraft design. After the war, they wrote the classic Handbook of Strength Calculations. The Admiralty Air Departmen...
4/Royle calls them “pioneers who demonstrated that it was possible for women to overcome the dogmatic, institutionalized prejudices of the time, and they earned the right to stand tall as credible applied mathematicians during the genesis of aircraft stress analysis”
5/ refs
Ross R 1916 Proc Royal Soc A 92; Ross R, Hudson H 1917. Proc Royal Soc A 93 (650): 212–225; Proc Royal Soc B 89(621):507
Royle T 2017. Historia Mathematica, 44(4): 342–366.
Barrow-Green J, Royle T 2022 doi.org/10.1007/978-3-…

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More from @HOS_ASA

Jun 14
"Student" Part 2: The paper now described as “path-breaking” received little if any notice at first. Gosset was a chemist, not a mathematician, so he struggled with proofs. He “guessed” (his words) the correct form of the distribution he called z based on the 1/9 🧵 Image
2/“properties of correlation coefficient & Professor Pearson's types of frequency curves".
Still a student at Cambridge, RA Fisher was the first to recognise the importance of Gosset’s 1908 paper, not just for its practical importance but b/c it was central Image
3/ to understanding an entire family of sampling problems. He went to his tutor FJM Stratton to discuss discrepancies between Gosset’s results & his own. Stratton had met Gosset on the latter’s previous visits to Cambridge. He suggested Fisher write to Gosset which he did. Image
Read 11 tweets
Jun 13
#OTD 1876 William Sealy Gosset b (d 16 Oct 1937) 🇬🇧Best known for Student's t-statistic & distribution, developed 1908 while working for Guinness Brewery. He is probably the first modern industrial statistician. 1/ ImageImage
2/ Guinness had almost doubled beer production between 1887 & 1914 so consistent quality was a concern. The problem was determining how representative a small sample might be of the whole batch. Gosset was assigned to the problem because he had taken maths at Oxford
3/ so was “less scared of this kind of problem than the other brewers”. Fisher greatly admired Gosset, calling him “one of the most original minds in contemporary science”.
Read 6 tweets
Jun 12
The first population #census in North America was performed in 1665-6 by Jean Talon (“Canada’s first official statistician”) 🇫🇷. He was appointed by Louis XIV of France to improve the management of French colonies in what is now 🇨🇦. 1/ Jean Talon 1625-1694
2/ He needed to measure the population to “gauge the progress of European colonization” & implement policies to diversify the economy & strengthen governance.
3/The census occurred during a hard winter, which actually was an advantage as most people had to stay home & could not travel. Talon proudly reported 3,418 people in total. However, there were many omissions -accidental & otherwise - duplications, & mistakes in adding up. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 4
In June 1905 Karl Pearson introduced the terms ‘kurtosis’, ‘leptokurtic’, ‘platykurtic’ & ‘mesokurtic’ to describe shapes of skewed frequency distributions. The paper was otherwise a huffy (& lengthy) rejoinder to some German critics of his 1899 paper on skew variation 1/4 Pearson K. 1905. Das Fehler...Image
2/ As well as highly entertaining criticisms of his foes, the paper also presents derivations & distribution data for a variety of biological data, including human skulls, crab ‘foreheads’, shell lengths, & organ weights. Image
3/ In 1927 WS Gosset ("Student") provided a humourous aide memoire: 'platykurtic' = platypus w short tails vs 'leptokurtic' = 2 kangaroos ‘lepping’ (I don't make this stuff up you know) Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 2
#OTD 2012 Genuchi Taguchi d (b 1 Jan 1924) 🇯🇵 founder of the Taguchi method for quality product improvement - reduction of process variation through robust design of experiments. His methods revolutionized manufacturing quality control practices & mindsets. 1/4 Image
2/ He collaborated throughout the 1950s with other notable statisticians such as CR Rao Fisher Shewart & was sponsored by Tukey at Princeton
3/ his methods differed from the conventional specifications based on tolerances alone but developed the concept of quality loss (rather than just quality)
Read 4 tweets
Jun 1
#OTD 1866 Charles Davenport b (d 18 Feb 1944)🇺🇸@amstat Fellow 1921. Director Cold Spring Harbor Labs. His 1899 text ‘Statistical Methods with Special Reference to Biological Variation’ actively promoted statistical methods pioneered by Galton & Pearson for biological research 1/7 ImageImage
2/ Reviews were cool (which incensed him): there were a lot of mistakes in the first edition, the amount of hand calculation was formidable, & he seemed to underestimate the difficulties for most researchers in their application.
3/ If you think Fisher, Galton, & Pearson were vile eugenicists they were nothing compared to Davenport. He founded the Eugenics Record Office ERO in 1910, & launched proposals to transform the human race (actually only part of it) by selective breeding of the picked few,
Read 7 tweets

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