Mathematics

"Although its evolution in the United States differed markedly from that of applied mathematics, statistics, too, benefited from the presence of the emigres and from the overall war effort. After a protracted period of professional differentiation from the social scientists and from the social sciences, mathematical statisticians had formed their own society, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), in 1935. By 1938, the IMS had also taken over responsibility for the Annals of Mathematical Statistics, a journal that had been founded in 1929 to serve the needs of the more mathematically and theoretically inclined statistical practitioners. Thus, when refugees like Neyman, William Feller, Mark Kac, and Abraham Wald took up positions in the United States at Berkeley, Brown, Cornell, and Columbia, respectively, they were able to participate in a young, but viable, community of mathematical statisticians."

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

"Statistics is the science of learning from data, and of measuring, controlling, and communicating uncertainty."

"There are no routine statistical questions, only questionable statistical routines."

"Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad would have been bewildered if you'd have told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illness you must first study statistics."

"A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspect of reality: statistics."

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess."

"Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring."

"Life in financial markets has got no relation to sigmas. I mean, if everybody who had ever operated in financial markets had never had any concept of standard errors, and so on, they would be a lot better off."

"...the statistician knows...that in nature there never was a normal distribution, there never was a straight line, yet with normal and linear assumptions, known to be false, he can often derive results which match, to a useful approximation, those found in the real world."

"Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models."

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

"I wish that people would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved (by large studies); the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion."

"In the 1930s English statistical theory was beginning to travel, with contributions from, amongst others, Hotelling and Snedecor in America and Darmois in France, but its home was still in England where there were four important centres: University College London, Rothamsted Experimental Station, Edinburgh University and Cambridge University with University College and Rothamsted far in the lead. Although Cambridge University was slow to adopt modern statistical theory, Cambridge men–Karl Pearson, Edmund Whittaker and Ronald Fisher–had put the other places on the statistical map. University College was the most established centre and its importance went back to 1893 when Karl Pearson, the professor of applied mathematics, first collaborated with Raphael Weldon, the professor of zoology on a subject they called “biometry.” There was a second surge in the “English statistical school” associated with R. A. Fisher who went to work at Rothamsted in 1919."

"New challenges driven by evolving global technology inspire fresh trends and approaches in teaching statistics in business schools of the 21st century."

"The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the art of statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service."

"To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose."

"In God we trust. All others must bring data."

"91.7 percent of all statistics are made-up on the spot."

"A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions."

"While it is easy to lie with statistics, it is even easier to lie without them."

"A statistical procedure is not an automatic, mechanical truth-generating machine."

"According to a University College London study (2014), 40% of women surveyed with severe mental illness had suffered rape or attempted rape in adulthood, and 53% of those had attempted suicide as a result. In the general population, 7% of women had been victims of rape or attempted rape, of whom 3% had attempted suicide. If these statistics don't sound accurate to you, your hesitation or disbelief supports another reality about rape research: Because so many individuals who survive a rape may not report a rape (for a multitude of reasons), statistics have limited meaning."

"Without the aid of statistics nothing like real medicine is possible."

"Uncertainty is a personal matter; it is not the uncertainty but your uncertainty."

"Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lampposts — for support rather than illumination."

"Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."

"Each of us has been doing statistics all his life, in the sense that each of us has been busily reaching conclusions based on empirical observations."

"Statistics is the study and informed application of methods for reaching conclusions about the world from fallible observations."

"Statistics is the art of stating in precise terms that which one does not know."

"Most people don’t have a good understanding of just how variable statistics are, even when you are dealing with robots."

"I think the essential thing if you want to be a good statistician, as opposed to being a mathematician, is to talk to people and find out what they're doing and why they're doing it."

"Statistics are often the last refuge of the antihumanist."

"Statistics is both the science of uncertainty and the technology of extracting information from data."

"A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's "big lie"; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you."

"“Without Statistics and numbers, it's a mere thought of unconvincing opinions.”"

"It is a statistical commonplace that the interpretation of a body of data requires a knowledge of how it was obtained."

"briefly, and in its most concrete form, the object of statistical methods is the reduction of data. A quantity of data, which usually by its mere bulk is incapable of entering the mind, is to be replaced by relatively few quantities which shall adequately represent the whole, or which, in other words, shall contain as much as possible, ideally the whole, of the relevant information contained in the original data."

"To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of."

"The rise of biometry in this 20th century, like that of geometry in the 3rd century before Christ, seems to mark out one of the great ages or critical periods in the advance of the human understanding."

"Statistics has been the most successful information science. Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it."

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

"In our private life as in our collective life there is no other truth than a statistical one."

"I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can't collect three grains of rice from everybody."

"Mathematicians are used to game-playing according to a set of rules they lay down in advance, despite the fact that nature always writes her own. One acquires a great deal of humility by experiencing the real wiliness of nature."

"To be a mathematician you must love mathematics more than family, religion, money, comfort, pleasure, glory. I do not mean that you must love it to the exclusion of family, religion, and the rest, and I do not mean that if you do love it, you'll never have any doubts, you'll never be discouraged, you'll never be ready to chuck it all and take up gardening instead. Doubts and discouragements are part of life. Great mathematicians have doubts and get discouraged, but usually they can’t stop doing mathematics anyway, and, when they do, they miss it very deeply. [...] Mind you, I am not recommending or insisting that you love mathematics. I am not issuing an order: “If you want to be a mathematician, start loving mathematics forthwith”—that would be absurd. What I am saying is that the love of mathematics is a hypothesis without which the conclusion doesn’t follow. If you want to be a mathematician, look into your soul and ask yourself how much you want to be one. If the wish isn’t very deep and very great, if it is not, in fact, maximal, if you have another desire that takes precedence, or even more than one, then you should not try to be a mathematician. The “should” is not a moral one; it is a pragmatic one. I think that you would probably not succeed in your attempt, and, in any event, you would probably feel frustrated and unhappy."

"Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen; redet man zu ihnen, so übersetzen sie es in ihre Sprache, und dann ist es alsobald ganz etwas anders."

"Avec toute l’algèbre du monde on n’est souvent qu’un sot lorsqu’on ne sait pas autre chose. Peut-être dans dix ans la société tirera-t-elle de l’avantage des courbes que des songe-creux d’algébristes auront carrées laborieusement. J’en félicite d’avance la postérité; mais, à vous parler vrai, je ne vois dans tous ces calculs qu’une scientifique extravagance. Tout ce qui n’est ni utile ni agréable ne vaut rien. Quant aux choses utiles, elles sont toutes trouvées; et, pour les agréables, j’espère que le bon goût n’y admettra point d’algèbre."

"I united the majority of well-informed persons into a club, which we called by the name of the Junto, and the object of which was to improve our understandings. ... The first members of our club were... Thomas Godfrey, a self-taught mathematician, and afterwards inventor of what is now called Hadley's dial; but he had little knowledge out of his own line, and was insupportable in company, always requiring, like the majority of mathematicians that have fallen in my way, an unusual precision in everything that is said, continually contradicting, or making trifling distinctions—a sure way of defeating all the ends of conversation. He very soon left us."

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."