''The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century'' () is a book by

David Salsburg David S. Salsburg (born 1931) is an author. His 2002 book ''The Lady Tasting Tea'', subtitled ''How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century'', provides a layman's overview of important developments in the field of statistics in t ...

about the history of modern

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 ...

and the role it played in the development of science and industry. The title comes from the " lady tasting tea", an example from the famous book, ''

The Design of Experiments ''The Design of Experiments'' is a 1935 book by the English statistician Ronald Fisher about the design of experiments and is considered a foundational work in experimental design. Among other contributions, the book introduced the concept of the ...

'', by

Ronald A. 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 ...

. Regarding Fisher's example, the statistician

Debabrata Basu Debabrata Basu (5 July 1924 – 24 March 2001) was an Indian statistician who made fundamental contributions to the foundations of statistics. Basu invented simple examples that displayed some difficulties of likelihood-based statistics and ...

wrote that "the famous case of the ' lady tasting tea'" was "one of the two supporting pillars ..of the randomization analysis of experimental data".

Summary

The book discusses the statistical revolution which took place in the twentieth century, where science shifted from a deterministic view (

Clockwork universe In the history of science, the clockwork universe compares the universe to a mechanical clock. It continues ticking along, as a perfect machine, with its gears governed by the laws of physics, making every aspect of the machine predictable. His ...

) to a perspective concerned primarily with probabilities and distributions and parameters. Salsburg does this through a collection of stories about the people who were fundamental in the change, starting with men like

R.A. 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 ...

and

Karl Pearson Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university st ...

. He discusses at length how many of these people had their own

philosophy of statistics The philosophy of statistics involves the meaning, justification, utility, use and abuse of statistics and its methodology, and ethical and epistemological issues involved in the consideration of choice and interpretation of data and methods o ...

, and in particular their own understanding of

statistical significance In statistical hypothesis testing, a result has statistical significance when it is very unlikely to have occurred given the null hypothesis (simply by chance alone). More precisely, a study's defined significance level, denoted by \alpha, is the p ...

. Throughout, he introduces in a very nontechnical fashion a variety of statistical ideas and methods, such as maximum likelihood estimation and bootstrapping.

Reception

The book was generally well-received, receiving coverage in a variety of medical and statistical journals. Reviewers from the medical field enjoyed Salsburg's coverage of Fisher's opposition to early research on the

health effects of tobacco Tobacco use has predominantly negative effects on human health and concern about health effects of tobacco has a long history. Research has focused primarily on cigarette smoking. Tobacco smoke contains more than 70 chemicals that cause can ...

. Critics disagreed with certain opinions that Salsburg voiced, like his barebones portrayal of Bayesian statistics and his seeming disdain for

pure mathematics Pure mathematics is the study of mathematical concepts independently of any application outside mathematics. These concepts may originate in real-world concerns, and the results obtained may later turn out to be useful for practical applications, ...

. Nevertheless, almost all reviewers appreciated the interesting read and recommended the book to people in their field as well as a general audience.

List of scholars mentioned

The book discusses a wide variety of statisticians, mathematicians, as well as other scientists and scholars. This is a list of those mentioned, broken down into groups of chapters.

Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-19

Chapters 20-29

References

External links

Publisher's web page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lady Tasting Tea 2002 non-fiction books Statistics books History of probability and statistics Henry Holt and Company books