Curated playlist
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
- Alvin HansenAlvin Harvey Hansen was born on the 23rd of August 1887 in Viborg, South Dakota, the son of a farmer. He died in 1975 having done more to shape American economic policy than perhaps any other economist of his century. Paul McCracken,…
- Edward ThorndikeEdward Lee Thorndike built one of the most influential theories in the history of psychology by watching cats try to escape from wooden boxes. Born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts in 1874, Thorndike would spend nearly his entire career at…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day. He was still a working economist at 94. That detail alone tells you something about the man. Born in Brooklyn on the…
- James TobinJames Tobin was born on the 5th of March, 1918, in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a journalist credited with inventing "Homecoming" at the University of Illinois. He died on the 11th of March, 2002, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age…
- Alan GreenspanAlan Greenspan stood before the United States Senate in February 1997 and told the assembled lawmakers that growing worker insecurity was, in his view, a significant factor keeping inflation low. The man who said that was not a minor…
- Oskar MorgensternOskar Morgenstern entered the world on the 24th of January 1902 in Görlitz, Prussian Province of Silesia. His mother was rumored to be a daughter of Emperor Frederick III. He grew up in Vienna, Austria, where he attended university. The…
- Gary BeckerGary Stanley Becker was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and by the time he died in Chicago on the 3rd of May 2014, he had done something that few economists ever manage: he had changed the questions his field…
- James HeckmanJames Joseph Heckman was born on the 19th of April 1944, and he would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for a statistical technique so fundamental that it now bears his name. The question at the heart of…
- I. J. GoodI. J. Good walked into Hut 8 at Bletchley Park on the 27th of May 1941, fresh from completing his doctorate at Cambridge, on the very day that Britain's Royal Navy destroyed the German battleship Bismarck. He had no idea that his own…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and philosopher, born in Tel Aviv on the 4th of September, 1936. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery gave Pearl the Turing Award, computing's highest…