📊The Greats

Better known as the founder of modern nursing, Nightingale was also a pioneering statistician who used data visualization to convince the British government that poor sanitation, not battle wounds, was killing most soldiers in the Crimean War, and became the first woman elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

“A well-designed chart can change government policy faster than the same numbers in a table ever will.”

Working as a chemist and statistician for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Gosset developed the t-distribution and t-test to solve a very practical problem — judging the quality of small barley samples — and published under the pseudonym 'Student' because Guinness barred employees from publishing under their own names.

“A method built to solve one narrow, practical problem can outlive its original purpose by more than a century.”

Indian-American statistician who, at age 25, derived the Cramér–Rao bound and the Rao–Blackwell theorem — two of the most widely used results in statistical estimation theory — and later helped build India's Indian Statistical Institute before a long career at American universities.

“A single, precisely proven result early in a career can outlast decades of a field's later fashions.”

American mathematician and statistician who co-invented the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm, invented the box plot, and argued in his 1962 paper 'The Future of Data Analysis' that analyzing real data should be recognized as its own scientific discipline distinct from mathematical statistics.

“Look at the data with your own eyes, using simple hand-drawn tools, before trusting any model built from it.”

Bell Labs statistician who coined 'data science' as the name for an enlarged statistics discipline in a 2001 paper, and separately invented widely used data-visualization and smoothing techniques including the LOESS local-regression method.

“Naming and formally proposing a field's boundaries in print can shape how universities organize around it years later.”

Led LinkedIn's data team where he and colleague Jeff Hammerbacher independently settled on the job title 'data scientist' around 2008, co-wrote the influential 2012 Harvard Business Review article naming it 'the sexiest job of the 21st century,' and later served as the first US Chief Data Scientist under President Obama.

“The right job title can shape how a whole profession is recruited into, almost as much as the work itself.”

Became bit.ly's chief scientist in 2009, one of the earliest people to hold the job title publicly, using the link-shortening service's massive click-stream data to study what spreads online, and later founded the machine-learning research startup Fast Forward Labs.

“A mundane infrastructure product can double as one of the richest research datasets available, if someone thinks to look.”