The Lady Tasting Tea: Statistics and the Revolution

Join the minons of math at Capriccio Cafe and espresso Bar on July 9th at 11 am to discuss The Lady Tasting Tea and the history and tools of the statistical revolution. You can find the book at amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Tasting-Tea-Statistics-Revolutionized/dp/0805071342/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464390986&sr=1-1&keywords=the+lady+tasting+tea) or abebooks.

From Amazon.com, "At a summer tea party in Cambridge, England, a lady states that tea poured into milk tastes differently than that of milk poured into tea. Her notion is shouted down by the scientific minds of the group. But one guest, by the name Ronald Aylmer Fisher, proposes to scientifically test the lady's hypothesis. There was no better person to conduct such a test. For Fisher had brought to the field of statistics an emphasis on controlling the methods for obtaining data and the importance of interpretation. He knew that how the data was gathered and applied was as important as the data themselves.

This sets the scene for The Lady Tasting Tea, a look at the history and the people that contributed to statistical revolution in the 20th century

Starting in the 1870’s Sir Francis Galton, half-cousin to Charles Darwin, made some of the first discoveries that kicked off the next century of statistical discovery and scientific research. During his work on heredity and biology, he developed and used tools and ideas in statistics in order to test his theories, like regression to the mean, coefficient of correlation, standard deviation, and the use of normal theory with histograms. This started a movement that span different countries and cultures, and David Salsburgs’ book demonstrates the personalities and the stories of the people involved.

There’s Karl Pearson, who changed the spelling of his name after becoming a fan of Karl Marx. He start the the journal Biometrika and had some minor squabbles with with R. A. Fisher. Fisher went on to become an important part of statistics in the 20th century, but also tried to prove that cigarettes weren't dangerous. The super mathematician A.N. Kolmogorov and his contributions to this field, his disappearance in the western world after the start of the cold war. The exciting Florence Nightingale David, her love of motorcycles and her work on the Correlation coefficient with Fisher.

The problem is, this book is about science and it’s a popular science book. To help with the math part of this, we’ll discuss a few of the techniques mentioned in the book. I feel the math helps clear up some of the points in the book and the book helps reinforce some of the math. For a place to start, here is the bio stat handbook (http://biostathandbook.com/). It is about biological statistics, but it has a page on how to use spreadsheets for statistical. I would suggest checking some of it out while you're reading, since it explains how to do Fisher’s Exact Test or a t-test.

Also, I know a few members are programmers and have worked with cluster analysis for algorithms. Feel free to add any experiences you’ve had to the discussion.