Frederick Mosteller

Charles Frederick Mosteller (December 24, 1916 – July 23, 2006) was an American mathematician, considered one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century. He was the founding chairman of Harvard's statistics department from 1957 to 1971, and served as the president of several professional bodies including the Psychometric Society, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Statistical Institute. He also taught courses at Harvard Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

He worked with his mathematical assistant Cleo Youtz from the 1950s until his departure from Harvard in 2003, and had an administrative assistant. He was well known for being a good writer, insisting on doing up to fifteen drafts of a paper or book chapter before showing it to his colleagues and several additional drafts before submitting the paper to a journal. the American Philosophical Society (1961), and the United States National Academy of Sciences (1974). He retired from classroom teaching in 1987, but continued working and publishing at Harvard through 2003. On January 3, 2004, he moved to Arlington, Virginia, to be closer to his children. Mosteller studied the attribution problem that asks who wrote each of the disputed Federalist Papers, James Madison or Alexander Hamilton. This analysis was carried out in order to demonstrate the power of Bayesian inference, and for that time was computationally intensive. It was featured in Time magazine on September 21, 1962.

Contributions to statistics education

Mosteller used the didactic method, among other approaches to teaching. He cared greatly about the teaching of statistics. He was a mentor to many, and his positive attitudes toward teaching influenced his many students.

His friend Robert E. K. Rourke once gave Mosteller an idea for presenting new material in lectures. Rourke called it PGP Particular General Particular, meaning that a lecture should always be "specific, general, specific". The advice was, begin with a particular interesting example, continue with a general point, and end with a particular example illustrating the general point. He rehearsed every lecture that he gave at least once, in the actual circumstances, for the timing of the lecture, and to avoid the temptation to speak quickly in order to fit in more material. Instead, he would cut out parts of the lecture. The show received its impressively large audience despite being broadcast at 6:30 am. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday covered the statistical material, and Tuesday and Thursday were problem sessions.

Graduate students Mosteller's graduate students included Janellen Huttenlocher, Persi Diaconis, Stephen Fienberg, Stanley Wasserman, Ralph D'Agostino, Sanford Weisberg and Ward Edwards.