C. Frederick Mosteller, Pioneer In Statistics Who Predicted Dewey Would Beat Truman, 89
DGH
C. Frederick Mosteller, the founding chairman of Harvard's statistics
department and a pioneer in using statistics to analyze an array of
topics as disparate as anesthesia, presidential elections and baseball,
died on Sunday, July 23, 2006, in Virginia, at the age of 89.
The cause of death was sepsis, said his son, William.
>From Dr. Mosteller's earliest research, he ventured where few
statisticians had gone before. During World War II, he calculated the
dispersion pattern of a string of bombs. After the 1948 presidential
election, he was a member of a committee that looked into how
presidential pre-election polls erroneously forecast Thomas E. Dewey as
the winner over Harry S. Truman, finding that pollsters' data had
contained signs that the election would be close and that their
analysis of the data had included unproven assumptions.
In the late 1950's, Dr. Mosteller assisted in analyzing data from a
large clinical study looking at the anesthetic halothane, which was
suspected of causing fatal liver damage in some patients. The analysis
showed no evidence that halothane was more dangerous than other forms
of anesthesia.
He worked with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a professor of government at
Harvard and later a senator from New York, on studies looking at the
impact of home life on children's performance in school. They argued
that raising families out of poverty would have a greater educational
impact than pouring money directly into schools.
Dr. Mosteller also appeared on national television in 1961, teaching a
course on statistics on NBC's early morning program "Continental
Classroom."
In 1962 he stepped into a question of prose. Scholars disagreed on who
- James Madison or Alexander Hamilton - was the author of a dozen
of the essays in the Federalist Papers, articles published anonymously
in 1787 and 1788 that described how the fledgling United States
government was to work. Analyzing the frequency of certain words -
like "upon," which Hamilton used frequently and Madison hardly at all
- Dr. Mosteller and David L. Wallace of the University of Chicago
[Illinois] concluded that Madison wrote all 12.
In the 1970's, Dr. Mosteller worked on studies that questioned whether
the benefits of some surgical procedures were worth their costs. In the
1980's, he was instrumental in persuading Tennessee to conduct a
controlled study on the effect of classroom size. The study showed
convincingly that smaller classes significantly helped children from
poorer minority families.
In his half-century career at Harvard, Dr. Mosteller served as chairman
of four departments.
"He was a remarkably disciplined scholar," said James Ware, the dean
for academic affairs at Harvard School of Public Health, "and he really
knew how to share with other people."
Charles Frederick Mosteller was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, on
December 24, 1916. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in
mathematics from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the forerunner
of Carnegie Mellon University. He received a doctorate in mathematics
from Princeton in 1946.
He then joined Harvard as a lecturer in the social relations
department. After being promoted to professor in 1951, he became acting
chairman of the department in 1953.
At that time, Harvard had nine statistics professors, and they were
scattered among different departments. In 1957, the university created
a statistics department, and Dr. Mosteller was its first chairman.
"Harvard literally created a department for Fred," said Richard Light,
an education professor at Harvard who was one of Dr. Mosteller's
graduate students.
In the 1970's, Dr. Mosteller was chairman of the biostatistics
department at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the 1980's he
was chairman of the health policy and management department. After
retiring in 1987, he continued to work as an emeritus professor until
he moved to Virginia two years ago.
In addition to his son William, of Falls Church, Virginia, Dr.
Mosteller is survived by his daughter, Gale Mosteller of Arlington,
Virginia; and a grandson. His wife, Virginia Gilroy Mosteller, with
whom he shared streetcar rides in Pittsburgh and married in 1941, died
in 2000.
In 1952, he published one of his best-known articles, "The World Series
Competition," in The Journal of the American Statistical Association.
That work, inspired by the Boston Red Sox's loss to the St. Louis
Cardinals in 1946, was the first known academic paper looking at the
statistics of baseball. Dr. Mosteller showed that the stronger team -
the one with a higher winning percentage - would still often lose a
series to a weaker team, simply because of chance.
"There should be no confusion here," he wrote, "between the 'winning
team' and the 'better team.'''
NY Times -- KENNETH CHANG
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