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Abstract:
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1) Anders Kiaer of Norway was, at the turn of the 20th century, the foremost advocate of the “representative method.” Against the odds, from 1895 to 1903, he kept the issue alive at the International Statistical Institute. After that, it was never mentioned again until 1925, when it reemerged triumphant at the ISI meeting. By then Kiaer had died. Why did he end his advocacy in 1903? How did the representative method become recognized as legitimate after being seen for so long as undesirable? 2) In June 1934 before the Royal Statistical Society, Jerzy Neyman of Poland demonstrated the superiority of the “random” selection version of the representative method over its equally accepted approach: “purposive” sampling. In the early 1950s, he was called upon for failing to recognize in that paper the work of an exiled Russian mathematician, Alexander A. Tschuprow, who, in 1923, had anticipated some of his findings. This was the second time he had “overlooked” Tschuprow’s paper. How could that be, when a few years earlier, in1927, he had been the center of a “very ugly” dispute for doing just that? And why did it take so long for this second “oversight” to be noticed?
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