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John Graunt
Born
John Graunt, a London haberdasher, studied the city's weekly bills of mortality and in 1662 published Natural and Political Observations, finding patterns such as more boys than girls being born and steady rates of death from particular causes. He produced an early life table estimating survival by age. His friend William Petty helped promote the work, and it is seen as a founding text of demography and epidemiology.
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William Playfair
Born
William Playfair, a Scottish engineer and economist who once worked for James Watt, invented the line graph and the bar chart in his Commercial and Political Atlas of 1786, and the pie chart in 1801. He used them to show England's trade, debt and prices at a glance. His charts were little copied in Britain at first, but they became the everyday way business and government present numbers.
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Adolphe Quetelet
Born
Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, applied the statistics of measurement error to people in the 1830s, describing crime rates, heights and chest sizes of soldiers through averages and distributions. His idea of the "average man" shaped early social science, though it was criticised as reducing people to means. His formula for weight relative to height, later named the body mass index, is still used in health screening.
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William Farr
William Farr joined the new General Register Office in England in 1839 and built the national system for recording causes of death, including an early classification of diseases. He used the figures to compare death rates between places and occupations, showing the toll of poor sanitation. He collaborated with Florence Nightingale, and after initially favouring the miasma theory, his 1866 analysis helped confirm water as cholera's route.
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John Snow
Born
John Snow, a London physician, argued that cholera spread through contaminated water, not bad air. In 1854 he mapped deaths around the Broad Street pump in Soho, helped by the local curate Henry Whitehead, and compared death rates among customers of two water companies, one drawing from sewage-polluted Thames water. The comparison, a natural experiment, became a model for epidemiology.
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Florence Nightingale
Born
Florence Nightingale, back from the Crimean War, worked with William Farr to analyse army death records and showed in 1858 that far more soldiers died of preventable disease in hospitals than of wounds. Her polar area diagrams made the point to ministers and the public, and helped win sanitary reforms. In 1859 she became the first woman elected to the Statistical Society of London.
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Charles Booth (social reformer)
Born
Charles Booth, a Liverpool shipowner, doubted claims that a quarter of Londoners lived in poverty and set out to measure it himself from 1886. With a team that included Beatrice Potter, later Beatrice Webb, and with school board visitors' records, he found the true share was nearer a third. His colour-coded street maps of London's poverty helped make the case for old-age pensions.
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W. E. B. Du Bois
Born
W. E. B. Du Bois carried out a door-to-door survey of Philadelphia's Black Seventh Ward for The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, one of the first large empirical studies in American sociology. For the 1900 Paris Exposition he and his Atlanta University students produced dozens of hand-drawn charts of Black American life, now celebrated as pioneering data visualisation.
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William Sealy Gosset
Born
William Sealy Gosset, a chemist at the Guinness brewery in Dublin, needed to draw reliable conclusions about barley and hops from very small samples. In 1908 he published the method now called Student's t-test under the pen name Student, because Guinness restricted staff publishing. Advised by Karl Pearson, he created a tool used in almost every small experiment since.
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Ronald Fisher
Born
Ronald Fisher, working at the Rothamsted agricultural research station from 1919, developed randomisation, analysis of variance and the design of experiments to make sense of decades of crop trials. His 1925 and 1935 books spread the methods to biologists and doctors. His legacy is now contested because of his strong support for eugenics, and some institutions have removed his name.
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Walter A. Shewhart
Born
Walter Shewhart, an engineer at Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories, drew the first control chart in a memo of 1924, separating ordinary random variation in a manufacturing process from signs that something had gone wrong. His approach became statistical quality control, the basis of modern manufacturing quality. W. Edwards Deming, who studied and worked with him, carried the ideas much further.
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Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
Born
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta in 1931 and pioneered large-scale sample surveys, first to estimate the jute crop and later through India's National Sample Survey from 1950. These showed that a well-designed sample could replace costly full counts. He also shaped the statistics behind India's second five-year plan.
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Jerzy Neyman
Born
Jerzy Neyman showed in a 1934 paper why random sampling, divided into sensible groups, beats hand-picking "typical" districts, laying the theory for modern surveys. With Egon Pearson he developed the framework of hypothesis testing, and he introduced confidence intervals. At Berkeley he built one of the leading statistics departments and applied the methods to agriculture, medicine and weather modification.
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George Gallup
Born
George Gallup used a much smaller sample of voters, chosen to represent the country, to predict Franklin Roosevelt's victory in 1936, while the Literary Digest's mail-in poll of over two million wrongly predicted Alf Landon. The result made scientific polling the standard. His quota methods failed in 1948 when polls wrongly predicted a Truman defeat, pushing pollsters towards random sampling.
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Gertrude Mary Cox
Born
Gertrude Mary Cox founded the department of experimental statistics at North Carolina State in 1940 and built a statistics institute serving agricultural and medical researchers across the American South. Her 1950 book Experimental Designs, written with William Cochran, became the standard handbook for planning field and clinical trials. She was the first woman elected to the International Statistical Institute.
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Abraham Wald
Born
Abraham Wald, working with the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University during the Second World War, showed how to estimate the vulnerability of bombers from damage on the aircraft that returned, reasoning that hits on planes that never came back were the ones that mattered. He also developed sequential analysis, testing items one by one until a decision was clear, which cut the cost of wartime quality inspection.
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Austin Bradford Hill
Austin Bradford Hill designed the Medical Research Council's 1948 trial of streptomycin for tuberculosis, widely regarded as the first properly randomised clinical trial in medicine. With Richard Doll he showed the link between smoking and lung cancer, and in 1965 he set out the considerations, now called the Bradford Hill criteria, still used to judge whether an association is likely to be causal.
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W. Edwards Deming
Born
W. Edwards Deming helped design sampling for the 1940 United States census, then from 1950 taught statistical quality control to Japanese engineers and executives at the invitation of their engineering union. Japan's top quality award, the Deming Prize, is named after him. He became famous at home only in 1980, when a television documentary asked why American industry could not match Japan.
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Archie Cochrane
Born
Archie Cochrane, a Scottish doctor who had run medical care in prisoner-of-war camps, argued in his 1972 book Effectiveness and Efficiency that health services should use treatments proven in randomised trials. He criticised medicine for failing to summarise its own evidence. The Cochrane Collaboration, founded in 1993 by Iain Chalmers and others, was named in his honour and produces systematic reviews worldwide.
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John Tukey
Born
John Tukey, at Princeton and Bell Labs, argued that analysts should look at data before testing it, and his 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis popularised the box plot and stem-and-leaf display. He coined the word "bit" and co-developed the fast Fourier transform with James Cooley. He also built election-night projection methods for NBC television.
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Bill James
Born
Bill James, working nights as a security guard at a Kansas pork-and-beans factory, self-published his first Baseball Abstract in 1977, questioning traditional statistics such as batting average and runs batted in. He called his approach sabermetrics. Two decades later teams such as the Oakland Athletics adopted the ideas, and the Boston Red Sox hired him as an adviser in 2003 before their 2004 title.
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David Spiegelhalter
Born
David Spiegelhalter, a Cambridge statistician, analysed death rates for the public inquiry into children's heart surgery at Bristol Royal Infirmary, which reported in 2001, and helped develop monitoring methods that could flag unusual mortality early. From 2007 he held a professorship in the public understanding of risk, and his books, including The Art of Statistics and The Art of Uncertainty, explain everyday risks to general readers.
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Hans Rosling
Born
Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor and professor of international health, used animated bubble charts in talks from 2006 to show how health and wealth had changed across countries, challenging assumptions about the developing world. He founded the Gapminder Foundation with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund, who built the Trendalyzer software. Their book Factfulness appeared in 2018, after his death.
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Nate Silver
Born
Nate Silver first built PECOTA, a system for forecasting baseball players' performance, then in 2008 started FiveThirtyEight, which combined many opinion polls with weighting for their track records to forecast American elections. He correctly called 49 of 50 states in 2008 and all 50 in 2012, and his probabilistic forecasts changed how media report polls. He now writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin.
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