From left: Frederick Mosteller, Stuart Rice, and Morris Hansen during the ASA’s 125th anniversary celebration in
Boston, Massachusetts, in november of 1964
Contributions
Hansen Brought the First
As chief of the Statistical Research
Computer to the Census
Division at the U.S. Census
Bureau, Hansen made several
significant advancements to the
In 1945, Morris Hansen met with J. P. Eckert
census. One of his early contribu-
and J. W. Mauchly of Eckert-Mauchly
tions, in 1937, was the design of
Corporation to purchase the world’s first
the Enumerative Check Census
commercially available computer for the u.S.
of Unemployment that sampled
Census Bureau. The computer was called postal delivery routes and ratio
unIVAC (unIVersal Automatic Computer). estimators. He also helped con-
vince the bureau to accept sam-
The first unIVAC was delivered to the bureau on
pling and quality control methods
March 31, 1951, and dedicated on June 14 of
in the 1940 Census and, in 1948,
that same year. Some facts about the unIVAC: he convinced Phil Hauser, then
acting director of the bureau, to
The unIVAC represented numbers in
let him conduct experiments in
binary coded decimal with six bits
each census to test improvements
for each digit for the next ones.
One of his more memorable
The central complex of the unIVAC
concepts was total survey design.
was about the size of a one-car garage:
This meant the introduction of
14 feet by 8 feet by 8.5 feet high nonsampling error into alterna-
tive survey designs. The theory,
It housed the mercury memory unit and
known as the Census Bureau
all the central processing unit circuitry
model of survey error, included
the contribution of data collec-
It was a walk-in computer: a clear
tors and data editors into the
Plexiglas door provided access to the
design of the survey.
center of the system
Collaborations
For more about the unIVAC, see http://ed-thelen.
Hansen gathered a talented
org/comp-hist/UNIVAC-I.html#Photo.
team of statisticians while work-
ing at the Census Bureau, one
of whom was Joseph Waksberg.
16 AMSTAT NEwS SEPTEMbER 2009
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80