Chester Ittner Bliss (February 1, 1899 – March 14, 1979) was primarily a

biologist A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual Cell (biology), cell, a multicellular organism, or a Community (ecology), community of Biological inter ...

, who is best known for his contributions to

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

. He was born in

Springfield, Ohio Springfield is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Clark County, Ohio, Clark County. The municipality is located in southwestern Ohio and is situated on the Mad River (Ohio), Mad River, Buck Creek, and Beaver Creek, approxim ...

in 1899 and died in 1979. He was the first secretary of the

International Biometric Society The International Biometric Society (IBS) is an international professional and academic society promoting the development and application of statistical and mathematical theory and methods in the biosciences, including biostatistics. It sponsors ...

Academic qualifications

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

Entomology Entomology () is the science, scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. In the past the term "insect" was less specific, and historically the definition of entomology would also include the study of animals in other arthropod groups, such ...

from

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

, 1921 *

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...

from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, 1922 * PhD from

, 1926 Remarkably, his statistical knowledge was largely self-taught and developed according to the problems he wanted to solve (Cochran & Finney 1979). Nevertheless, in 1942 he was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

Major contributions

The idea of the

probit In probability theory and statistics, the probit function is the quantile function associated with the standard normal distribution. It has applications in data analysis and machine learning, in particular exploratory statistical graphics and s ...

function was published by Bliss in a 1934 article in ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

'' on how to treat data such as the percentage of a pest killed by a

pesticide Pesticides are substances that are meant to control pests. This includes herbicide, insecticide, nematicide, molluscicide, piscicide, avicide, rodenticide, bactericide, insect repellent, animal repellent, microbicide, fungicide, and lampri ...

. Bliss proposed transforming the percentage killed into a "probability unit" (or "probit"). Arguably his most important contribution was the development, with

Ronald Fisher Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who a ...

, of an iterative approach to finding

maximum likelihood In statistics, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a method of estimation theory, estimating the Statistical parameter, parameters of an assumed probability distribution, given some observed data. This is achieved by Mathematical optimization, ...

estimates in the

method of

bioassay A bioassay is an analytical method to determine the concentration or potency of a substance by its effect on living animals or plants (''in vivo''), or on living cells or tissues(''in vitro''). A bioassay can be either quantal or quantitative, dir ...

. Additional contributions in

biological assay An assay is an investigative (analytic) procedure in laboratory medicine, mining, pharmacology, environmental biology and molecular biology for qualitatively assessing or quantitatively measuring the presence, amount, or functional activity of a ...

were work on the analysis of time-mortality data and of slope-ratio assays (Cochran & Finney 1979). Bliss introduced the word

rankit In statistics, rankits of a set of data are the expected values of the order statistics of a sample from the standard normal distribution the same size as the data. They are primarily used in the normal probability plot, a graphical technique for ...

, meaning an expected

normal Normal(s) or The Normal(s) may refer to: Film and television * ''Normal'' (2003 film), starring Jessica Lange and Tom Wilkinson * ''Normal'' (2007 film), starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Kevin Zegers, Callum Keith Rennie, and Andrew Airlie * ''Norma ...

order statistic In statistics, the ''k''th order statistic of a statistical sample is equal to its ''k''th-smallest value. Together with rank statistics, order statistics are among the most fundamental tools in non-parametric statistics and inference. Importan ...

References

Citations

Sources

* C. I. Bliss (1935) The calculation of the dosage-mortality curve, Annals of Applied Biology 22, 134–167. (includes appendix by Fisher.) * W. G. Cochran,

D. J. Finney David John Finney (3 January 1917 – 12 November 2018), was a British statistician and Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Edinburgh. He was Director of the Agricultural Research Council's Unit of Statistics from 1954 to 1984 ...

. 1979 Chester Ittner Bliss, 1899–1979, Biometrics; 35(4): 715–717
pdf
*

. 1980 Chester Ittner Bliss, 1899–1979,

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society The ''Journal of the Royal Statistical Society'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of statistics. It comprises three series and is published by Wiley for the Royal Statistical Society. History The Statistical Society of London was founded ...

, Series A, 143(1): 92–93. * T. R. Holford & C. White (2005) Bliss, Chester Ittner, Encyclopedia of Biostatistics.

External links

University of Adelaide: Correspondence between C. I. Bliss and R. A. Fisher

University of Adelaide: Fisher's appendix to Bliss (1935)
* Chester Ittner Bliss papers (MS 1165). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library

* 1899 births 1979 deaths American statisticians Fellows of the American Statistical Association Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni {{US-statistician-stub