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What are the most important statisticians and what is it that made them famous? (Reply just one scientist per answer please)

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Converted to community wiki. – mbq♦ Dec 4 '10 at 0:14
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If it weren't CW it would have to be closed as subjective and argumentative! – whuber♦ Dec 21 '10 at 19:37
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up vote 33 down vote accepted

Reverend Thomas Bayes for discovering Bayes' theorem

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That this was selected indicates a biased prior. – Iterator Aug 6 '11 at 0:20
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up vote 51 down vote

Ronald Fisher for his fundamental contributions to the way we analyze data, whether it be the analysis of variance framework, maximum likelihood, permutation tests, or any number of other ground-breaking discoveries.

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It's worth noting that Fisher is equally famous for his work as a biologist (evolutionary biology and agricultural science) as he is for his statistical work. – Michael Lew Dec 4 '10 at 6:49
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Even today, I occasionally meet geneticists who ask me whether it is true that the great geneticist R. A. Fisher was also an important statistician -- Leonard Savage (Annals of Statistics, 1976 jstor.org/stable/2958221). – onestop Dec 4 '10 at 8:06
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If you want to ask a tough question, ask who the second most famous statistician is. There's no doubt that Fisher is # 1. You may not like the man or some of his ideas, but he is undoubtedly the creator of Statistics as we know it today. – Carlos Accioly Dec 6 '10 at 22:41
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@Carlos "undoubtedly the creator" are you a member of FA (Fisher's Adorators) ? Anyway Gauss introduced least square almost a hundred year before Fisher was born, and Fisher as well as Gauss were inspired by a lot of other very inspired people... it is a long and laborious story and unfortunatly for those who like THX surround movies I don't really think it has its Guru. – robin girard Dec 15 '10 at 7:30
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up vote 32 down vote

John Tukey for Fast Fourier Transforms, exploratory data analysis (EDA), box plots, projection pursuit, jackknife (along with Quenouille). Coined the words "software" and "bit".

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up vote 28 down vote

Karl Pearson for his work on mathematical statistics. Pearson correlation, Chi-square test, and principal components analysis are just a few of the incredibly important ideas that stem from his works.

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up vote 27 down vote

William Sealy Gosset for Student's t-distribution and the statistically-driven improvement of beer.

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Maybe not the most famous statistician, but when you put it like that, definitely the most important! ;o) – Dikran Marsupial Dec 5 '10 at 0:13
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up vote 24 down vote

Bradley Efron for the Bootstrap - one of the most useful techniques in computational statistics.

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up vote 20 down vote

George Box for his work on time series, designed experiments and elucidating the iterative nature of scientific discovery (proposing and testing models).

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While looking for other names in Wikipedia, I stumbled on the fact that Box was a son-in-law of Fisher's. – Wayne Dec 13 '10 at 22:05
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up vote 19 down vote

Francis Galton for discovering statistical correlation and promoting regression.

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+1 for Francis Galton played a very important role in giving importance to the concept of correlation. However, I found a bit strong the formulation "creating correlation". I would quote Galton itself: << "Co-relation or correlation of structure" is a phrase much used in biology, and not least in that branch of it which refers to heridity, and the idea is even more frequently present than the phrase; but I am not aware of any attempt to define it clearly >> In : "Co-relation and their Measurment" (see here galton.org/galton/index.html) – robin girard Dec 15 '10 at 9:19
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@IrishStat. Yup, a lot of the early statisticians were eugenists, including Pearson and Fisher. But, they were still great statisticians. – Neil McGuigan May 22 '11 at 17:26
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@IrishStat: Fisher was the first president of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society, wrote for Eugenics Review and Annals of Eugenics from 1914 to 1947, and was appointed professor of eugenics at University College London in 1933. – Henry Sep 23 '11 at 0:27
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up vote 17 down vote

Pierre-Simon Laplace for work on fundamentals of (Bayesian) probability.

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up vote 17 down vote

Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson for work on experimental design, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and the Neyman-Pearson lemma.

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up vote 14 down vote

Andrey Markov for stochastic processes and markov chains.

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he was a mathematician that was very important to statistics. Half of the men on here lived before statistics was an "official" field of study . – Neil McGuigan Dec 15 '10 at 8:48
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up vote 13 down vote

Florence Nightingale for being "a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics" and developing the polar area diagram. Yes, that Florence Nightingale!

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up vote 12 down vote

Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov, for putting probability theory on a rigorous mathematical footing. While he was a mathematician, not a statistician, undoubtedly his work is important in many branches of statistics.

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+1 for Kolmogorov. Without him, a rigorous treatment of most fundamental statistical concepts would not be possible and therefore statistics not as reliable as they are now. – Thilo Dec 4 '11 at 13:42
up vote 10 down vote

Edwin Thompson Jaynes for work on objective Bayesian methods, particularly MaxEnt and transformation groups.

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up vote 10 down vote

Harold Jeffreys for revival of Bayesian interpretation of probability.

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up vote 10 down vote

How has Sir David Roxbee Cox not been mentioned yet?

Some feats: Cox proportional hazards models, experimental design, he did a lot of work on stochastic processes and binary data. He also advised many students who went on to do great work (Hinkley, McCullagh, Little, Atkinson, etc.)

And the man was knighted!

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up vote 9 down vote

Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat for creating the theory of probability and inventing the idea of expected value (1654) in order to solve a problem grounded in statistical observations (from gambling).

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up vote 6 down vote

W. Edwards Deming for promoting statistical process control

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up vote 5 down vote

George Dantzig for the Simplex Method, and for being the student who mistook two open statistics problems that Neyman had written on the board for homework problems, and in his "ignorance" solving them. I'd vote for him just for the story.

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This story is identical to one told about John Milnor. In Milnor's case there's at least one paper (co-authored with his professor when Milnor was still an undergraduate) to give the story credence. Have you ever found a reference to the paper(s) Dantzig wrote giving his solutions? – whuber♦ Dec 13 '10 at 23:17
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up vote 5 down vote

Roderick Little and Donald Rubin for the contributions in Missing Data Analysis.

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up vote 4 down vote

Samuel S. Wilks was a leader in the development of mathematical statistics. He developed the theorem on the distribution of the likelihood ratio, a fundamental result that is used in a wide variety of situations.

He also helped found the Princeton statistics department, where he was Fred Mosteller's advisor, among others, and has a prestigious ASA award named after him.

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up vote 4 down vote

C.R. Rao for the Rao–Blackwell theorem and the Cramer-Rao bound.

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up vote 3 down vote

Teuvo Kohonen for invention of the Self-Organizing-Map (SOM).

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@downvoter: Why ? – steffen Dec 7 '10 at 10:02
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and maybe also Bishop, Svensen and Williams for putting SOM on a clean probabilistic footing via the Generative Topographic Mapping. (And I didn't down vote anything either...) – conjugateprior Dec 23 '10 at 23:13
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up vote 3 down vote

Lucien Le Cam for his contribution to mathematical statistics. (maybe Local asymptotic normality and contiguity made him famous)

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up vote 3 down vote

Leland Wilkinson for his contribution to statistical graphics.

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Should we add Hadley Wickham for making GoG possible in R? – chl♦ Dec 15 '10 at 20:41
up vote 3 down vote

David Donoho development of multiscale ideas in statistics, and a lot of theoretically justified while practically very efficient ideas in very high dimensional statistics, CHA: computational harmonic analysis,...

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up vote 3 down vote

Adolphe Quetelet for his work on the "average man", and for pioneering the use of statistics in the social sciences. Before him, statistics were largely confined to the physical sciences (astronomy, in particular).

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