Resource Library

I bet on a horse at ten-to-one. It didn't come in until half-past five. is a quote by comedian and violinist Henny Youngman (1906 - 1998).

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so. is a quote of American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841 - 1935). The quote is found in an article written by Justice Holmes in 1918 for the "Harvard Law Review" v. 32, page 40. The quote is also found in the book "Statistically Speaking, a Dictionary of Quotations" by Carl Gaither and Alma Cavazos-Gaither.

Most accidents in well-designed systems involve two or more events of low probability occurring in the worst possible combination. is a quote by American systems engineering expert Robert E. Machol (1917 - 1998). The quote is found in his 1975 column "Principles of Operations Research" for the journal "Interfaces" vol. 5, pages 53-54 (this column was titled "The Titanic Coincidence."

This anecdote about luck and the horseshoe is found in "Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes" (2000: page 68).

A cartoon to teach the idea that the mean of a distribution is found by integrating xf(x).

;;; statistics is not a branch of mathematics. Indeed so; the whole of applied mathematics is merely a branch of statistics in which random error is reduced to zero. This a quote from Statistician and former associate director of the Census Bureau and ASA President Barbara Bailar (1935 - ). The quote is found in the January 1988 "College Mathematics Journal" as part of her written response to David Moore's article "Should Mathematicians Teach Statistics?."

This song is an ode to bad teaching in statistics written by Dennis Pearl to be sung to the tune of Roger Miller's 1965 classic country/pop tune "King of the Road." Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.

In our society, if you love dogs, cats, or goldfish you're considered normal and even nice. Say a kind word for statistics and you're regarded as a little mad. This is a quote from Newsweek and Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson (1945 - ). The quote appears in a column titled "The Joy of Statistics" in "Newsweek" on November 4, 1985.

The true method of knowledge is experiment. This is a quote of British poet and artist William Blake (1857 - 1827). The quote is found in his 1788 book "All religions are one".

A highly trained mathematical statistician without knowledge of the subject can be quite as dangerous as a subject-matter specialist trying to use statistical methods of which he has little knowledge. This is a quote of American Economist and Statistician Aryness Joy Wickens (1901 - 1991). The quote is from her Presidential Address to the American Statistical Association at the 112th annual meeting on December 28, 1952. The full address is reprinted in "JASA" v. 48 p. 1-14. (picture from LIFE magazine; copyright by Time, Inc. for non-commercial use only)