Rating: 
Summary: Engaging history of statistics, but illiterate on science
Review: This book is almost wonderful. It presents an account of the history of statistics that I almost couldn't put down. While other reviewers have complained about the lack of detail in the descriptions of statistical principles and techniques, what this book does have, which I haven't seen anywhere else is an informal account that guides the reader to the original literature. Salsburg is a wonderful writer. The book focuses on biographical anecdotes, some of them from personal interactions Salsburg had with his subjects, which follow the development of 20th century statistics. Salsburg's love of his subject is contageous and I repeatedly found myself staying up later than was good for me to read another chapter. I would guess that much of the book might be hard to follow for someone not familiar with statistics, but if you know what an F test or a t test is, this will give you a new appreciation of how they were invented and may well inspire you to drop by the library and read the original papers. The weakness of this book is Salsburg's tendency to pontificate about areas of which he clearly knows next to nothing. For some bizarre reason, he dismisses chaos theory (something that certainly has been oversold to the public) saying that this discipline has no more rigorous methods than asserting the subjective similarity of Poincare maps and that there is no experimental evidence that Nature is chaotic. Apparently, Salsburg could not be bothered to glance through even the most basic literature of the field, such as the experimental confirmation of universality in period doubling, the rigorous quantitative application of the Lorenz equations (which he dismisses) to experimental data from bistable lasers, or techniques such as Grassberger and Procaccia's of rigorously determining the properties of Poincare maps. This stuff has been in the mainstream scientific literature for over 20 years, so Salsburg has no excuse to make pronouncements without learning anything about it. In fact, Salsburg seems to use chaos as a stalking horse for an attack on determinism in physical science, but he misses the notion that Lyopunov expansion and much of KAM theory can be expressed just fine in the statistical notation that Salsburg is fond of. The burgeoning field of quantum chaology has matured enough in the for the last 10 years or so it has been possible to investigate the chaotic behavior of statistical systems rigorously and meaningfully, but Salsburg only advances his nondeterministic view of the physical world in back-handed asides, and never presents it to us straightforwardly for inspection. Still, if you forgive Salsburg his ignorance of science, he clearly is a master of the mathematical statistics he presents and this is an engaging book that I am very glad to have in my library and which I am heartily recommending to my friends.
Rating:
Summary: GOOD HISTORY OF STATISTICS AND ITS INFLUENCE IN SCIENCE
Review: This book is in no way technical or mathematical. The author focused on explaining basic concepts and their importance without getting into the details of the stats behind it. Hence, it is a book focused on a general audience wanting to learn about the history and the characters that pushed statistics forward mainly in the 20th century (there was not much before). It should be a very easy and interesting read for someone knowledgeable of very basic math and stats (if you know what a standard deviation is, you should be ok).
The author, as a lifelong statistician, is clearly in awe of the characters described, such as Pearson and Fisher, which do seem to a bit influence his writing. For example, he is descriptive of personal meetings with some of the main described characters, which leaves me thinking that, aside from a history of stats, this may also be his personal history. Overall, this is seldom seem, and it does not much hurt the content, which is clearly very well researched and written. If you are looking to add to your knowledge and are done with pop science, this may be an interesting next book.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting history of statistics over the 20th Century
Review: This is a really nice history of statistics over the 20th Century and the impact of statistics on advances in science and medicine. I particularly enjoyed many of the interesting anecdotes of the people involved in the development of statistics. My only complaint is that this book is very good in describing the input of East Coast statisticians but is rather lacking with respect to West Coast statisticians. West Coast statisticians are either not mentioned, or their affiliations are incorrectly stated. I was somewhat surprised that others had not noted this glaring gap, which is why I wrote this particular review and give the book only 4 stars. Otherwise, this is an interesting, entertaining read.
| 
