[July 27th] New York Times: "C. Frederick Mosteller, a Pioneer in Statistics, Dies at 89"

Notes from David Bee to the AP stats list...

"Dr. Mosteller was the first Chairman of the Stat Dept at Harvard, which was created in 1957. Four years later, he, in a way, did the first "Against All Odds" on television, introducing the country to statistics by teaching a stat course on NBC's program "Continental Classroom". [Did anyone see it? (I was way too young at the time.)]

The following year he did something that turned out to be one of the many things he was known for: By analyzing word frequencies in The Federalist Papers, he and David Wallace concluded that James Madison had written all twelve of the disputed essays.

With respect to books, his inexpensive Fifty Challenging Problems In Probability has been around for over forty years, and he wrote Understanding Robust and Exploratory Data Analysis with David C. Hoaglin and the founder of EDA, John Tukey. (Several books of tributes to him and his work were published in the early 1990s.)

In David Salsburg's The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science In The Twentieth Century, the author describes, in the chapter about Bayesian Stat [Chapter 13: The Bayesian Heresy], how Mosteller and Wallace, by repeated use of Bayes's Theorem, used estimates of parameters and hyperparameters "to measure the probability associated with the statement: Madison (or Hamilton) wrote this paper."

For some more info, goto www.harvard.edu