Four Men Who Were Presidents in the History of the American Statistical Association: Selected Vignettes

• Activity Number: 216
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Fritz Scheuren and Mary Batcher*+
• Companies: NORC at the University of Chicago and Ernst & Young
• Keywords: ASA Pesidents ; history

Abstract

From its founding in 1839, until very recently most Presidents of the American Statistical Association have been men. In this paper we divide the History of ASA into 11 periods. The first and longest ended in 1914, just 100 years ago. All these early founding Presidents were men. Indeed, all the ASA Presidents were men until 1945. In fact in each of the 10 year periods 2045-2054, 2055-2064, 2065-2074, 2075-2084, 2085-2094, and 2095-2004 most were still men. Only in the period, beginning with 2005 to the present, have the two genders been on a rough parity. In our JSM talk attention will be confined to just three periods: We will start with John Koren, ASA President in 1914, at the start of the "Great War", continue with Frederick Mosteller ASA President in 1968, whose JSM presidential talk was the first for one of us. Hard to end but we chose Bob Hogg (1988) and George Box (1978) together because of their humor. The period after 2004 is omitted as perhaps too familiar and not yet historical enough.