Social Science Statistics Blog

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30 July 2006

C. Frederick Mosteller, 1916-2006

C. Frederick Mosteller, the first chairman of the Statistics Department at Harvard, passed away last week at the age of 89. He served as chair of the Statistics Department from 1957 to 1969, and later chaired the departments of Biostatistics and Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. His obituary in the New York Times mentions his work reviewing the performance of pollsters in the Dewey-Truman election of 1948 and his explanation of the Red Sox inexplicable loss in the 1946 World Series ("There should be no confusion here between the 'winning team' and the 'better team'"), but doesn't say that he took a leave of absence in the early sixties to record a lecture series for NBC. According to one history of the Statistics Department, 75,000 students took the course for credit and 1.20 million (give or take) watched the lectures on television. Imagine doing that today....

Posted by Mike Kellermann at 8:55 PM