Statistician Quotes & Sayings

The median isn't the message. — Stephen Jay Gould

It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon. — Robert Hooke

We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of. — Ronald Fisher

Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it. — Bradley Efron

No scientist is as model minded as is the statistician; in no other branch of science is the word model as often and consciously used as in statistics. — Hans Freudenthal

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. — E. M. Forster

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician. — Nate Silver

Don't be a novelist
be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination. — Darrell Huff

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation — Lillian Hellman

Celine snorted. "Never have I ever had a thing for blondes," she said. And then, her eyes on Sloane, she shot our statistician a dazzling smile and lowered her own finger - meaning that she did have a thing for blondes. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone. — Paul Theroux

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process. — George E.P. Box

Every time I sit with our general manager at a baseball game, and there's number-cruncher and statistician guy - I'm sitting around - they start talking about stuff, and I say, 'What's that? I've never heard of that one before.' — George Brett

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet. — Neil Postman

I'm not a statistician, but it doesn't take a genious to work out that 100 million children being denied an education is ridiculous. There is nothing lost in translation here, it's obvious that's wrong. — Scarlett Johansson

If a chess statistician were to try and satisfy his curiousity over which stage of the game proved decisive in the majority of cases, he would certainly come to the conclusion that it is the middlegame that provides the most decisive stage. — Alexander Kotov

Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I may remark parenthetically that the modern apparatus of the theory of small samples, once it goes beyond the determination of its own specially defined parameters and becomes a method for positive statistical inference in new cases, does not inspire me with any confidence unless it is applied by a statistician by whom the main elements of the dynamics of the situation are either explicitly known or implicitly felt. — Norbert Wiener

Another merit of home is that it preserves the diversity between individuals. If we were all alike, it might be convenient for the bureaucrat and the statistician, but it would be very dull, and would lead to a very unprogressive society. — Bertrand Russell

Data scientist (noun): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician. - Josh Wills — Rachel Schutt

Any environmental biologist or statistician will tell you that humankind's best chance of long-term survival occurs with a global population of around four billion. — Dan Brown

I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science). — Lloyd DeMause

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation. — Ronald Fisher

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. — Ronald Fisher

Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides-that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist-but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development. — Edwin Conklin

Years ago a statistician might have claimed that statistics deals with the processing of data ... to-days statistician will be more likely to say that statistics is concerned with decision making in the face of uncertainty. — Herman Chernoff

The median is not the message, — Stephen Jay Gould

If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment. — Ernest Rutherford

Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental. — George E.P. Box

Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue. — Ronald Fisher

The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process he applies or recommends. — Ronald Fisher

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either. — Evan Esar

The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics. — Udny Yule

As the statistician George E. P. Box wrote, "All models are wrong, but some models are useful." What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be. As another mathematician said, "The best model of a cat is a cat."
...
The key is in remembering that a model is a tool to help us understand the complexities of the universe, and never a substitute for the universe itself. — Nate Silver

Poverty . . . is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation," the Scottish merchant and statistician Patrick Colquhoun, turned London magistrate, said in 1806, ironically in an argument for raising people from destitution and misery to mere poverty. "It is the lot of man - it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth."113 And weren't the poor resentful that they could not eat rich meats, sauces, and sweets and dubious about the rule that each rank in society needed a distinct diet? — Rachel Laudan

If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment. — Ernest Rutherford

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard. — John Tukey

Thought Leadership
"The new economics for industry, government, education" Book by W. Edwards Deming
"In God we trust. All others must bring data."
William Edwards Deming,
Statistician, Professor and Author
#smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business — W. Edwards Deming

The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician. — Tom Rath

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action. — W. Edwards Deming

This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway? — Thomas Pynchon