Items24The creator’s order
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John GrauntBorn 24 Apr 1620John 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…0 - 2
William PlayfairBorn 22 Sept 1759William 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…0 - 3
Adolphe QueteletBorn 22 Feb 1796Adolphe 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…0i - 4
William FarrWilliam 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…0i - 5
John SnowBorn 15 Mar 1813John 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…0i - 6
Florence NightingaleBorn 12 May 1820Florence 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…0i - 7
Charles Booth (social reformer)Born 30 Mar 1840Charles 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…0i - 8
W. E. B. Du BoisBorn 23 Feb 1868W. 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…0i - 9
William Sealy GossetBorn 13 Jun 1876William 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…0i - 10
Ronald FisherBorn 17 Feb 1890Ronald 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…0i
