“Statistics makes chemists better chemists,” he said. “It also
makes lawyers better lawyers.” Statistics can also make real contri-
butions in the humanities.
In 1966, Mosteller and The University of Chicago statistician
David Wallace published a groundbreaking statistical study of liter-
ary provenance in the journal Biometrics. They used complex math-
ematical statistics and the theory of inference to investigate the dis-
puted authorship of 12 of the 85 Revolutionary War-era Federalist
Papers. (The real author, they proved, was James Madison.)
Harvard President Drew Faust, Lincoln Professor of History,
visited the celebration the first morning. She called statistics
“a very important milestone … in the history of ideas”—and one
that allowed “the animating spirit of trespassing freely across intel-
lectual boundaries.”
Faust’s sixth book, This Republic of Suffering—due out next
year—describes how Americans coped with a death toll of 620,000
from the Civil War, 2% of the nation’s population. “They turned to
numbers,” she said, “as a way of trying to understand.”
Attendees at the anniversary conference—about 240—also
heard from Jeremy Bloxham, dean for the physical sciences and
acting dean for the life sciences at Harvard. (He is also Harvard
Stephen Blyth: To understand risk, one needs to be
College professor, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Geophysics,
able to “reason about uncertainty.”
and a professor of computational science at Harvard’s School of Staff photo Justin Ide/Harvard News Office
Engineering and Applied Sciences.)
Bloxham praised the department for its “intellectual diversity,” Today, statistics has an important role to play in shaping the new
and for being central to the “broad intellectual landscape” of the general education curriculum for undergraduates, said Bloxham.
Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Students will leave Harvard not only with good qualitative critical
Mosteller, who died last year, typified the polymaths statisticians skills, but “capable of good qualitative criticism,” he said—“an abil-
can be. He applied statistical techniques to medicine, business, educa- ity to see through [any] statistical arguments being made.”
tion, and many more fields of inquiry. After statistics, he went on to Stephen Blyth agreed that is important. He earned a statistics
chair three other departments at Harvard, a feat unmatched since. PhD in 1992 and is now a visiting scholar in the department, as
Mosteller “felt he could have a foothold in any arena,” said well as vice president for the international fixed-income portfolio
Massachusetts Institute of Technology computational scien- at the Harvard Management Company. To understand risk, said
tist Emery Brown, a physician who earned a PhD in statistics at Blyth, one needs to be able to “reason about uncertainty.”
Harvard in 1988 and now also teaches anesthesia at Massachusetts Most departments at Harvard want to double in size, said Bloxham.
General Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. “Fred started “In the case of statistics, I don’t think we need to think very hard about
[interdisciplinary work] before it was a buzzword.” that,” he said. “It needs to grow, and grow very substantially.” ■
More than 5,000 attendees from 46 countries
More than 800 student attendees
More than 500 technical sessions
125 employers hiring for more than 275 positions
80+ exhibitors
Sponsored by:
Register online at
www.amstat.org/meetings/
American Statistical Association
International Biometric Society
jsm/2008/onlinereg.
(ENAR and WNAR)
Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Statistical Society of Canada
MAY 2008 AMSTAT NEWS 11
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