The Lady Tasting Tea

Contents

1. The Lady Tasting Tea

2. The Skew Distributions

3. That Dear Mr. Gosset

4. Raking Over the Muck Heap

5. Studies in Crop Variation

6. The Hundred Year Flood

7. Fisher Triumphant

8. The Dose that Kills

9. The Bell Shaped Curve

10. Testing Goodness of Fit

11. Hypothesis Testing

12. The Confidence Trick

13. The Bayesian Heresy

14. The Mozart of Mathematics

15. The Worm’s Eye View

16. Doing Away with Parameters

17. When Part Is Better than the Whole

18. Does Smoking Cause Cancer?

19. If You Want the Best Person...

20. Just a Plain Texas Farm Boy

21. A Genius in the Family

22. The Picasso of Statistics

23. Dealing With Contamination

24. The Man Who Remade Industry

25. Advice From the Lady in Black

26. The March of the Martingales

27. The Intent to Treat

28. The Computer Turns Upon Itself

29. The Idol With Feet of Clay

In the tradition of Peter Bernstein's (1993) Capital Ideas, David Salsburg's The Lady Tasting Tea is a delightful non-technical history of statistics. Salsburg tells of the bitter rivalry between the two fathers of statistics: Pearson and Fisher. We learn of William Gosset, who published groundbreaking research under the pen name Student. He had to because his employer, the Guinness Brewing Company, prohibited employees from publishing their work. We read about early use of the normal distribution, hypothesis testing, and goodness-of-fit tests. The author tells of the emerging Bayesian "heresy." The fascinating origins of extreme value theory are detailed. We learn about non-parametric statistical methods and much more.

 

This light, personality-focused treatment will appeal to all readers. You don't need to know any probability or statistics to enjoy the book. Indeed, it will teach you, at least intuitively, a tremendous amount of statistics as you read. Readers who will enjoy the book most are those who have some experience working with probability and statistics but are not experts. They will appreciate learning the stories behind the techniques they use. They will also enjoy discovering new topics in statistics with which they are not familiar.

I can't recommend this book highly enough.

 

For related books, see sections:

Math - Probability

History - Histories

 

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