Francis John Anscombe (13 May 1918 – 17 October 2001) was an English

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

. Born in Hove in England, Anscombe was educated at

Trinity College Trinity College may refer to: Australia * Trinity Anglican College, an Anglican coeducational primary and secondary school in , New South Wales * Trinity Catholic College, Auburn, a coeducational school in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, New ...

at Cambridge University. After serving in the Second World War, he joined Rothamsted Experimental Station for two years before returning to Cambridge as a lecturer. In experiments, Anscombe emphasized randomization in both the design and analysis phases. In the design phase, Anscombe argued that the experimenters should

randomize Randomization is the process of making something random. Randomization is not haphazard; instead, a random process is a sequence of random variables describing a process whose outcomes do not follow a deterministic pattern, but follow an evolution d ...

the labels of blocks. In the analysis phase, Anscombe argued that the randomization plan should guide the analysis of data; Anscombe's approach has influenced John Nelder and

R. A. Bailey Rosemary A. Bailey (born 1947) is a British statistician who works in the design of experiments and the analysis of variance and in related areas of combinatorial design, especially in association schemes. She has written books on the desi ...

in particular. He moved to Princeton University in 1956, and in the same year he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He became the founding chairman of the

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 ...

department at Yale University in 1963. Anscombe's quartet 3

According to David Cox, his best-known work may be his 1961 account of formal properties of residuals in

linear regression In statistics, linear regression is a linear approach for modelling the relationship between a scalar response and one or more explanatory variables (also known as dependent and independent variables). The case of one explanatory variable is call ...

. His earlier suggestion for a variance-stabilizing transformation for Poisson data is often known as the

Anscombe transform In statistics, the Anscombe transform, named after Francis Anscombe, is a variance-stabilizing transformation that transforms a random variable with a Poisson distribution into one with an approximately standard Gaussian distribution. The Ansc ...

. He later became interested in

statistical computing Computational statistics, or statistical computing, is the bond between statistics and computer science. It means statistical methods that are enabled by using computational methods. It is the area of computational science (or scientific computin ...

, and stressed that "a computer should make both calculations ''and'' graphs", and illustrated the importance of graphing data with four data sets now known as

Anscombe's quartet Anscombe's quartet comprises four data sets that have nearly identical simple descriptive statistics, yet have very different distributions and appear very different when graphed. Each dataset consists of eleven (''x'',''y'') points. They were ...

. He later published a textbook on statistical computing in APL. In economics and decision theory he is best known for a 1963 paper with Robert Aumann which provides the standard basis for the theory of

subjective probability Bayesian probability is an interpretation of the concept of probability, in which, instead of frequency or propensity of some phenomenon, probability is interpreted as reasonable expectation representing a state of knowledge or as quantification o ...

. He was brother-in-law to another well-known statistician,

John Tukey John Wilder Tukey (; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distributi ...

of Princeton University; their wives were sisters.

References

External links

*
Francis John Anscombe Papers.
Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. {{DEFAULTSORT:Anscombe, Francis J Rothamsted statisticians English statisticians American statisticians Yale University faculty Cambridge mathematicians Academics of the University of Cambridge Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge People from Hove 1918 births 2001 deaths Fellows of the American Statistical Association Burials at Princeton Cemetery English expatriates in the United States