1 Ten Statisticians and Their Impacts Daniel B. Wright Ten Statisticians and Their Impacts for Psychologists Daniel B. Wright Florida International University Address correspondence to Daniel B. Wright, Psychology Department, Florida International University, 11200 S.W. 8th Street, Miami, FL 33199; e-mail:
[email protected]. 2 ABSTRACT—Although psychologists frequently use statistical procedures, they are often unaware of the statisticians most associated with these procedures. Learning more about the people will aid understanding of the techniques. In this article, I present a list of 10 prominent statisticians: David Cox, Bradley Efron, Ronald Fisher, Leo Goodman, John Nelder, Jerzy Neyman, Karl Pearson, Donald Rubin, Robert Tibshirani, and John Tukey. I then discuss their key contributions and impact for psychology, as well as some aspects of their nonacademic lives. 3 The disciplines of psychology and statistics have grown up as close companions; they are "inextricably bound together" (Stigler, 1992, p. 60). Although each can track their intellectual genealogies back millennia, as academic disciplines they are only about 100 years old. Early on, single individuals like Galton and Spearman could make substantive impacts in the core of both fields, but academic specialization and the development of both disciplines make this more difficult in modern times. Many psychologists like Abelson, Cohen, Cronbach, and Meehl have crossed into statistics, but their efforts have been mainly to bring statistical science into psychology. Others like Cattell, Coombs, Luce, Shepard, Stevens, Swets, Thurstone, and Tversky have focused on measurement and psychometrics. Measurement is fundamental for science (Borsboom, 2006), and psychologists have arguably done more for measurement theory than any other discipline (Hand, 2004).