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 Hove is a seaside resort and one of the two main parts of the city of Brighton and Hove, along with Brighton in East Sussex, England. Originally a "small but ancient fishing village" surrounded by open farmland, it grew rapidly in the 19th cen ...

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 ...

Cambridge University , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

. After serving in the Second World War, he joined

Rothamsted Experimental Station Rothamsted Research, previously known as the Rothamsted Experimental Station and then the Institute of Arable Crops Research, is one of the oldest agricultural research institutions in the world, having been founded in 1843. It is located at Harp ...

for two years before returning to Cambridge as a lecturer. In

experiment An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into Causality, cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome oc ...

s, Anscombe emphasized randomization in both the design and analysis phases. In the

design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to 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 Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...

phase, Anscombe argued that the randomization plan should guide the analysis of data; Anscombe's approach has influenced

John Nelder John Ashworth Nelder (8 October 1924 – 7 August 2010) was a British statistician known for his contributions to experimental design, analysis of variance, computational statistics, and statistical theory. Contributions Nelder's work was infl ...

and R. A. Bailey in particular. He moved to

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

in 1956, and in the same year 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 ...

. 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 Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

in 1963.

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 Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...

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 ...

; 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