Strength in Numbers: The Rising of Academic Statistics Departments in the U. S.

Statistical science as organized in formal academic departments is relatively new.  With a few exceptions, most Statistics and Biostatistics departments have been created within the past 60 years.  This book consists of a set of memoirs, one for each department in the U.S. created by the mid-1960s. The memoirs describe key aspects of the department’s history -- its founding, its growth, key people in its development, success stories (such as major research accomplishments) and the occasional failure story, PhD graduates who have had a significant impact, its impact on statistical education, and a summary of where the department stands today and its vision for the future.  Read here all about how departments such as at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford started and how they got to where they are today. The book should also be of interests to scholars in the field of disciplinary history.

• Academic statistics
• Biostatistics departments
• History of statistics
• Statistics as an academic discipline
• Statistics departments

From the book reviews:

“Alan Agresti and Xiao-Li Meng have gathered the stories of 39 statistics and biostatistics departments in the United States … . Anyone who is interested in the history and sociology of our discipline, or in the history of science more generally, should find much of interest in this book.” (Nicole Lazar, Technometrics, Vol. 55 (4), November, 2013)

• , Statistics Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA

  Alan Agresti

• , Statistics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

  Xiao-Li Meng

Alan Agresti is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida.  He is the author of five books, including the influential text Categorical Data Analysis, and more than 100 research articles.  He has presented invited talks and short courses in more than 30 countries. His honors include an Honorary Doctor of Science from De Montfort University (UK),   the Statistician of the Year award from the Chicago chapter of ASA, and an Excellence in Continuing Education award from the American Statistical Association.

Xiao-Li Meng is Whipple V. N. Jones Professor and Chair of Statistics at Harvard University, where he has been since serving on the faculty of the University of Chicago from 1991-2000. One of the world’s experts on statistical inference with partially observed data and on simulation methods, he has also become an influential leader in statistical education, including development of the “Happy course” at Harvard.  Meng’s awards include the COPSS award for outstanding statistician under the age of 40, the Mosteller Statistician of the Year award from the Boston chapter of ASA, and the University of Chicago Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

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