Comments on: Frederick Mosteller Is Dead

By: Tracy Lightcap

Tracy Lightcap — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 02:53:16 +0000

Irony strikes! I was just over at the Empirical Legal Studies blog. They have a new thread on methods pieces that everyone should read. I just posted Mosteller and Tukey’s classic paper, Data analysis, including statistics (1968!) as one that I think we STILL haven’t caught up with.

He was a truly great scholar. He’ll be missed badly. And I agree with Rob about Data analysis and regression. Another work we haven’t caught up to yet.

By: S

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:46:09 +0000

West Virginia sure seems to produce its fair share of outstanding American mathematical talent.

By: mcd

mcd — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:45:49 +0000

Heard about him all the time when I had a short stint at Harvard School of Public Health. He and Robert Rosenthal were pioneers in developing the tools of meta-analysis, which lets you combine the result of many different studies to arrive at a global net effect of variables.

By: cosma

cosma — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:40:47 +0000

Ajax: I am not about to attempt to defend that comment! (For that matter, I think there’s a lot more to be said in favor of Brush-Mosteller-style learning models…) But I do think “professional narrowness and belligerent ignorance” is a bit unfair to my adopted profession.

By: Ajax

Ajax — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:27:07 +0000

The page you refer us to, “Tales of the Statisticians”, has this very telling statement:

“The problem of the Prisoner’s Dilemma lost steam along with the rest of the movement, only to find a second home in that all-purpose backwater, philosophy.”

I’ve rarely seen such a statement that reveals so well the professional narrowness and belligerent ignorance of most statisticians. Thank goodness for computer scientists, political scientists, economists, sociologists, biologists, business strategists, complexity theorists, historians, pure mathematicians, cognitive scientists, and any others with a sincerely-motivated interest in evolutionary game theory.

By: Barry

Barry — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:12:06 +0000

Odd; I don’t recall that name.

By: Rob St. Amant

Rob St. Amant — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 15:48:36 +0000

My favorites of his books (I’m a computer scientist) are the collaborations with Tukey et al.: Data Analysis and Regression and “sequels”. He wrote very accessible material that led the reader to consider underlying concepts in statistics, rather than to focus only on the mechanics.

By: bi

bi — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:50:32 +0000

I’m interested in authorship attribution, so I’m making a mental note to look up some of this stuff on the Federalist Papers.