Agenda

Speaker: Professor Alan Agresti, University of Florida

Abstract:
We discuss the evolution in the presentation of statistical science in textbooks during the first half of the twentieth century as the field became better defined by advances due to Ronald Fisher and Jerzy Neyman.  An early influential book with 14 editions was authored by G. Udny Yule.  Methods books authored by Fisher, George Snedecor, and Austin Bradford Hill showed scientists how to implement Fisher's advances.  Later books from the World War 2 era authored by Maurice Kendall, Samuel Wilks, and Harald Cramer had stronger emphasis on the theoretical foundations.  The Bayesian approach emerged somewhat later in textbooks, influenced strongly by books by Harold Jeffreys and Leonard Savage.  We conclude by discussing the future of textbooks on the foundations of statistical science in the emerging, ever-broader, era of data science.   

Bio Sketch:
Alan Agresti is a distinguished statistician renowned for his contributions to categorical data analysis. He earned a bachelor`s degree in mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1968, followed by a doctorate in statistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972. Under the mentorship of Stephen Stigler, his doctoral research focused on stochastic processes. Agresti is the author of several seminal textbooks on categorical data analysis, which have become essential references in the field. The Agresti–Coull confidence interval, a widely used method for estimating binomial proportions, is named in his honor along with his former doctoral student, Brent Coull.