Jump to content

Frederick Mosteller

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Frederick Mosteller
Born(1916-12-24)December 24, 1916
Clarksburg, West Virginia,U.S.
DiedJuly 23, 2006(2006-07-23)(aged 89)
Arlington, Virginia,U.S.
Other namesFred Mosteller
Alma materCarnegie Institute of Technology
Princeton University
Known forStatisticseducation
Scientific career
FieldsStatistician
InstitutionsHarvard University
Doctoral advisorSamuel S. WilksandJohn Tukey
Doctoral studentsPersi Diaconis
Stephen Fienberg
Stanley Wasserman
Scholiahas a profile forFrederick Mosteller(Q735455).

Charles Frederick Mosteller(December 24, 1916 – July 23, 2006) was an American mathematician, considered one of the most eminentstatisticiansof the 20th century. He was the founding chairman ofHarvard's statistics department from 1957 to 1971, and served as the president of several professional bodies including thePsychometric Society,theAmerican Statistical Association,theInstitute of Mathematical Statistics,theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science,and theInternational Statistical Institute.[1]

Biographical details

[edit]

Frederick Mosteller was born inClarksburg, West Virginia,on December 24, 1916, to Helen Kelley Mosteller and William Roy Mosteller. His father was a highway builder. He was raised nearPittsburgh, Pennsylvania,and attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (nowCarnegie Mellon University). He completed his ScM degree at Carnegie Tech in 1939, and enrolled at Princeton University in 1939 to work on a PhD with statisticianSamuel S. Wilks.[1]

In 1941 he married Virginia Gilroy, whom he met during college. They had two children: Bill (born 1947) and Gale (born 1953). They lived inBelmont, Massachusetts.and spent summers inWest Falmouth, Massachusettson Cape Cod.

Mosteller worked in Samuel Wilks'sStatistical Research Groupin New York city duringWorld War IIon statistical questions about airborne bombing. He received hisPhDinmathematicsfromPrinceton Universityin 1946.

He was hired byHarvard University's Department of Social Relations in 1946, where he receivedtenurein 1951 and served as acting chair from 1953 to 1954. He founded the Department of Statistics and served as its first chairman from 1957 to 1969, 1973, 1975 to 1977. He chaired the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1977 to 1981 and later the Department of Health Policy and Management in the 1980s. His four chairmanships have not been matched.[1]He also taught courses at Harvard Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

He worked with his mathematical assistantCleo Youtzfrom the 1950s until his departure from Harvard in 2003, and had an administrative assistant. He was well known for being a good writer, insisting on doing up to fifteen drafts of a paper or book chapter before showing it to his colleagues and several additional drafts before submitting the paper to a journal.[1]

Mosteller was an elected member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences(1954),[2]theAmerican Philosophical Society(1961),[3]and theUnited States National Academy of Sciences(1974).[4]He retired from classroom teaching in 1987, but continued working and publishing at Harvard through 2003. On January 3, 2004, he moved toArlington, Virginia,to be closer to his children.[1]

Contributions to statistics

[edit]

Mosteller wrote over 50 books and over 350 papers, with over 200 coauthors. An avid fan of theBoston Red Sox,he conducted what was perhaps the first academic investigation of baseball, after the Red Sox lost the 1946 World Series.[1]Some of his work involved research evaluation and synthesis, especially in medicine and public health.[1]

WithDavid Wallace[5][6]Mosteller studied the attribution problem that asks who wrote each of the disputedFederalist Papers,James MadisonorAlexander Hamilton.This analysis was carried out in order to demonstrate the power ofBayesian inference,and for that time was computationally intensive. It was featured inTimemagazine on September 21, 1962.[1][7]

Contributions to statistics education

[edit]
See also:Statistics education

Mosteller used thedidactic method,among other approaches to teaching. He cared greatly about theteaching of statistics.He was a mentor to many, and his positive attitudes toward teaching influenced his many students.

His friend Robert E. K. Rourke once gave Mosteller an idea for presenting new material in lectures.[8]Rourke called it PGP Particular General Particular, meaning that a lecture should always be "specific, general, specific". The advice was, begin with a particular interesting example, continue with a general point, and end with a particular example illustrating the general point.[8]

Prompted by a seminar byDerek Bok,in the last two or three minutes of the class Mosteller would ask the students to write down what was the muddiest point in the lecture and what they'd like to know more about.[9]He rehearsed every lecture that he gave at least once, in the actual circumstances, for the timing of the lecture, and to avoid the temptation to speak quickly in order to fit in more material. Instead, he would cut out parts of the lecture.[8]

Mosteller taught a class in probability and statistics as part of the educational television program,Continental Classroom- Mathematics,in 1960 and 1961, supported by theFord Foundationand broadcast on NBC: 75,000 students took this class for credit at 320 colleges and universities around the country, and 1.2 million watched the lectures on television on 170 stations.[10]The show received its impressively large audience despite being broadcast at 6:30 am. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday covered the statistical material, and Tuesday and Thursday were problem sessions.[citation needed]

Graduate students

[edit]

Mosteller's graduate students includedJanellen Huttenlocher,Persi Diaconis,Stephen Fienberg,Stanley Wasserman,Ralph D'Agostino,Sanford Weisberg[11]andWard Edwards.

References

[edit]
  1. ^abcdefgh"Founder of Harvard's Statistics Department, Frederick Mosteller, dies".Harvard Gazette. July 25, 2006.RetrievedJanuary 12,2013.
  2. ^"Charles Frederick Mosteller".American Academy of Arts & Sciences.RetrievedNovember 21,2022.
  3. ^"APS Member History".search.amphilsoc.org.RetrievedNovember 21,2022.
  4. ^"Frederick Mosteller".www.nasonline.org.RetrievedNovember 21,2022.
  5. ^Mosteller, F. & Wallace, D.L. (1964) Inference and disputed authorshipThe Federalist,Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
  6. ^Frederick Mosteller;David L. Wallace (2007).Inference and Disputed Authorship The Federalist.Center for the Study of Language & Information.ISBN978-1-57586-552-2.OL17891964M.WikidataQ102306435.
  7. ^"Education: Madison's Avenue".Time.September 21, 1962.
  8. ^abcMosteller, Frederick, Classroom and Platform Performance,The American Statistician,34, pp. 11–17, 1980.pdf
  9. ^Bruce Brooks, E. (2001)Tales of Statisticians: Frederick MostellerArchivedMay 27, 2016, at theWayback Machine
  10. ^Rick Wicklin,"The first MOOC in statistics",blog,SAS Institute,October 2, 2013.
  11. ^Mathematics Genealogy Project: Frederick Mosteller.North Dakota State University

Further reading

[edit]
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frederick_Mosteller&oldid=1234347816"