George Alfred Barnard
Encyclopedia
George Alfred Barnard was a British
statistician
known particularly for his work on the foundations of statistics and on quality control
.
, London
. His father was a cabinet maker and his mother had been a domestic servant. George's sister Dorothy Wedderburn became a sociologist and eventually Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London
. George attended the local grammar school, the Monoux School
, and from there he won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge
to read mathematics. In 1937 he went on to Princeton University
to do graduate work on mathematical logic with Alonzo Church
. Shortly before Alan Turing
had gone from Cambridge to study with Church.
Barnard was on holiday in Britain when the Second World War started and he never went back to Princeton to finish his PhD. The war made Barnard into a statistician as it did for many mathematicians of his generation. In 1940 he joined an engineering firm, Plessey
, as a mathematical consultant. In 1942 he moved to the Ministry of Supply to apply quality control and sampling methods to the products for which they were responsible. It was there that Barnard began doing statistics. The group he was put in charge of included Peter Armitage
, Dennis Lindley
and Robin Plackett
. Lindley recalls that they were like students working for a doctorate with Barnard as supervisor. Abraham Wald
was in a similar group in the United States. Both groups developed sequential methods of sampling.
At the end of the war, Barnard went to Imperial College London
, as a lecturer, becoming a reader in 1948 and professor of mathematical statistics in 1954. In 1966 he moved to the newly created University of Essex
, from which he retired in 1975. Barnard, however, kept on doing statistics until he died aged 86. Until 1981 he spent much of each year at the University of Waterloo
, Canada
, and after that he continued writing papers and corresponding with colleagues all over the world.
Barnard's best known contribution is probably his 1962 paper on likelihood inference but the paper he thought his best was the 1949 paper in which he first espoused the likelihood principle
. He had originally described the principle in the context of optional stopping. A statement by Savage
brings out how surprising the principle first seemed (Foundations of Statistical Inference, 1961, p. 75)
Barnard’s first publication was “A New Test for 2X2 Tables
” (1945). The old test
was Fisher's
and Fisher was not pleased! However he convinced Barnard that the new improved test was inferior to the old and the two became friends. Barnard had actually met Fisher in 1933 just before he left school. Barnard liked telling the story of their meeting. Barnard had done a survey of the political attitudes of sixth-formers
and how they had formed them. He ended up going to Fisher for advice on analyzing the results. Fisher showed him Statistical Methods for Research Workers
and said, “if you read this book, you’ll find a lot of statements in it that are made without proof. You’re a mathematician, you should be able to prove them for yourself. And if you’ve done that, you’ll know statistics.” Barnard found the last piece of the puzzle nearly twenty years later—just as he was becoming vice-President of the Royal Statistical Society
to Fisher’s President. The story could be a metaphor for a side of Barnard's work. He kept returning to Fisher's work, trying to clarify his recondite ideas on likelihood, fiducial probability and pivotal inference. Barnard came under Fisher's spell just as his star was fading for the younger generation of statisticians and he remained Barnard’s great hero amongst statisticians.
In an interview Barnard recalled, “my main interest above everything was politics from about 1933 until 1956. Well, that’s not true—until the end of the war it would be fair to say.” At school he proposed the motion to the school debating society that “Socialism is preferable to Capitalism." He joined the Communist Party
in 1933 and he took part in anti-fascist marches in the east end of London. At Plessey he was chairman of the shop stewards.
Barnard served terms as president of three societies, the Royal Statistical Society
in 1971-2, the Operational Research Society in 1962-4 and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
in 1970-1. He was awarded the Guy Medal
in Gold by the Royal Statistical Society in 1975.
In May 1986 Barnard was awarded an honorary degree
by the Open University
as Doctor of the University and in 1994 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Essex
.
Barnard was a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association
until his death. http://www.humanism.org.uk/about/people/obituaries/george-barnard
George Barnard was very open-minded and very well liked. Lindley wrote in The Statistician, “We have lost a great statistician and a delightful human being. “
There is a bibliography (containing 109 articles) up to 1989 in
This contains a review of Barnard's work by Lindley. The volume was one of a series honouring Bayesian heroes. Barnard was not a Bayesian but he was a "great guy"!
In 1990 he made a book out of manuscripts left by his friend Egon Pearson
After 1990 Barnard published little, although he kept up his letter writing. In 1996 however he produced a review of Barndorff-Nielsen and Cox
After observing that, “A great virtue of the book is that it raises perhaps as many questions as it answers,” Barnard went on to give his answer one of those questions.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
statistician
Statistician
A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...
known particularly for his work on the foundations of statistics and on quality control
Quality control
Quality control, or QC for short, is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. This approach places an emphasis on three aspects:...
.
Biography
George Barnard was born in WalthamstowWalthamstow
Walthamstow is a district of northeast London, England, located in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. It is situated north-east of Charing Cross...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. His father was a cabinet maker and his mother had been a domestic servant. George's sister Dorothy Wedderburn became a sociologist and eventually Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London
Royal Holloway, University of London
Royal Holloway, University of London is a constituent college of the University of London. The college has three faculties, 18 academic departments, and about 8,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students from over 130 different countries...
. George attended the local grammar school, the Monoux School
Sir George Monoux College
Sir George Monoux College is a sixth form college located in Walthamstow, East London.-Brief history:Sir George Monoux, the founder of the College, was born in or before 1465. In 1506 he was a Warden of the Drapers Company, in 1509 he became the Sheriff of London and later in 1514 he became Lord...
, and from there he won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge
St John's College, Cambridge
St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's alumni include nine Nobel Prize winners, six Prime Ministers, three archbishops, at least two princes, and three Saints....
to read mathematics. In 1937 he went on to Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
to do graduate work on mathematical logic with Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, Church–Turing thesis, Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem.-Life:Alonzo Church...
. Shortly before Alan Turing
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
had gone from Cambridge to study with Church.
Barnard was on holiday in Britain when the Second World War started and he never went back to Princeton to finish his PhD. The war made Barnard into a statistician as it did for many mathematicians of his generation. In 1940 he joined an engineering firm, Plessey
Plessey
The Plessey Company plc was a British-based international electronics, defence and telecommunications company. It originated in 1917, growing and diversifying into electronics. It expanded after the second world war by acquisition of companies and formed overseas companies...
, as a mathematical consultant. In 1942 he moved to the Ministry of Supply to apply quality control and sampling methods to the products for which they were responsible. It was there that Barnard began doing statistics. The group he was put in charge of included Peter Armitage
Peter Armitage
Peter Armitage is a statistician specialising in medical statistics.Peter Armitage attended Huddersfield College and went on to read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Armitage belonged to the generation of mathematicians who came to maturity in the Second World War...
, Dennis Lindley
Dennis Lindley
Dennis Victor Lindley is a British statistician, decision theorist and leading advocate of Bayesian statistics.Dennis Lindley grew up in the south-west London suburb of Surbiton. He was an only child and his father was a local building contractor...
and Robin Plackett
Robin Plackett
Robin L. Plackett was a statistician best known for his contributions to the history of statistics and to experimental design, most notably the Plackett–Burman designs....
. Lindley recalls that they were like students working for a doctorate with Barnard as supervisor. Abraham Wald
Abraham Wald
- See also :* Sequential probability ratio test * Wald distribution* Wald–Wolfowitz runs test...
was in a similar group in the United States. Both groups developed sequential methods of sampling.
At the end of the war, Barnard went to Imperial College London
Imperial College London
Imperial College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom, specialising in science, engineering, business and medicine...
, as a lecturer, becoming a reader in 1948 and professor of mathematical statistics in 1954. In 1966 he moved to the newly created University of Essex
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...
, from which he retired in 1975. Barnard, however, kept on doing statistics until he died aged 86. Until 1981 he spent much of each year at the University of Waterloo
University of Waterloo
The University of Waterloo is a comprehensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The school was founded in 1957 by Drs. Gerry Hagey and Ira G. Needles, and has since grown to an institution of more than 30,000 students, faculty, and staff...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, and after that he continued writing papers and corresponding with colleagues all over the world.
Barnard's best known contribution is probably his 1962 paper on likelihood inference but the paper he thought his best was the 1949 paper in which he first espoused the likelihood principle
Likelihood principle
In statistics,the likelihood principle is a controversial principle of statistical inference which asserts that all of the information in a sample is contained in the likelihood function....
. He had originally described the principle in the context of optional stopping. A statement by Savage
Leonard Jimmie Savage
Leonard Jimmie Savage was an American mathematician and statistician. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said Savage was "one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius."...
brings out how surprising the principle first seemed (Foundations of Statistical Inference, 1961, p. 75)
I learned the stopping ruleStopping ruleIn probability theory, in particular in the study of stochastic processes, a stopping time is a specific type of “random time”....
principle from Professor Barnard in … 1952. Frankly, I then thought it a scandal that anyone in the profession could advance an idea so patently wrong, even as today I can scarcely believe that some people resist an idea so patently right.
Barnard’s first publication was “A New Test for 2X2 Tables
Barnard's test
In statistics, Barnard's test is an exact test of the null hypothesis of independence of rows and columns in a contingency table. It is an alternative to Fisher's exact test but is more time-consuming to compute...
” (1945). The old test
Fisher's exact test
Fisher's exact test is a statistical significance test used in the analysis of contingency tables where sample sizes are small. It is named after its inventor, R. A...
was Fisher's
Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation...
and Fisher was not pleased! However he convinced Barnard that the new improved test was inferior to the old and the two became friends. Barnard had actually met Fisher in 1933 just before he left school. Barnard liked telling the story of their meeting. Barnard had done a survey of the political attitudes of sixth-formers
Sixth form
In the education systems of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and of Commonwealth West Indian countries such as Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, Jamaica and Malta, the sixth form is the final two years of secondary education, where students, usually sixteen to eighteen years of age,...
and how they had formed them. He ended up going to Fisher for advice on analyzing the results. Fisher showed him Statistical Methods for Research Workers
Statistical Methods for Research Workers
Statistical Methods for Research Workers is a classic 1925 book on statistics by the statistician R.A. Fisher. It is considered by some to be one of the 20th century's most influential books on statistical methods. According to ,...
and said, “if you read this book, you’ll find a lot of statements in it that are made without proof. You’re a mathematician, you should be able to prove them for yourself. And if you’ve done that, you’ll know statistics.” Barnard found the last piece of the puzzle nearly twenty years later—just as he was becoming vice-President of the Royal Statistical Society
Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...
to Fisher’s President. The story could be a metaphor for a side of Barnard's work. He kept returning to Fisher's work, trying to clarify his recondite ideas on likelihood, fiducial probability and pivotal inference. Barnard came under Fisher's spell just as his star was fading for the younger generation of statisticians and he remained Barnard’s great hero amongst statisticians.
In an interview Barnard recalled, “my main interest above everything was politics from about 1933 until 1956. Well, that’s not true—until the end of the war it would be fair to say.” At school he proposed the motion to the school debating society that “Socialism is preferable to Capitalism." He joined the Communist Party
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain was the largest communist party in Great Britain, although it never became a mass party like those in France and Italy. It existed from 1920 to 1991.-Formation:...
in 1933 and he took part in anti-fascist marches in the east end of London. At Plessey he was chairman of the shop stewards.
Barnard served terms as president of three societies, the Royal Statistical Society
Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...
in 1971-2, the Operational Research Society in 1962-4 and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications is the UK's chartered professional body for mathematicians and one of the UK's learned societies for mathematics ....
in 1970-1. He was awarded the Guy Medal
Guy Medal
The Guy Medals are awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Gold Medal is awarded triennially, the other two are awarded annually...
in Gold by the Royal Statistical Society in 1975.
In May 1986 Barnard was awarded an honorary degree
Honorary degree
An honorary degree or a degree honoris causa is an academic degree for which a university has waived the usual requirements, such as matriculation, residence, study, and the passing of examinations...
by the Open University
Open University
The Open University is a distance learning and research university founded by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom...
as Doctor of the University and in 1994 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Essex
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...
.
Barnard was a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association
British Humanist Association
The British Humanist Association is an organisation of the United Kingdom which promotes Humanism and represents "people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs." The BHA is committed to secularism, human rights, democracy, egalitarianism and mutual respect...
until his death. http://www.humanism.org.uk/about/people/obituaries/george-barnard
George Barnard was very open-minded and very well liked. Lindley wrote in The Statistician, “We have lost a great statistician and a delightful human being. “
Publications
- G. A. Barnard (1945) "A New Test for 2X2 Tables", Nature, 156, 177 & 783.
- G. A. Barnard (1946) "Sequential Tests in Industrial Statistics", Journal of the Royal Statistical SocietyJournal of the Royal Statistical SocietyThe Journal of the Royal Statistical Society is a series of three peer-reviewed statistics journals published by Blackwell Publishing for the London-based Royal Statistical Society.- History :...
Supplement, 8, 1-26.
There is a bibliography (containing 109 articles) up to 1989 in
- Seymour Geisser et al. (eds) Bayesian and Likelihood Methods in Statistics and Econometrics : Essays in Honor of George A. Barnard, North-Holland 1990.
This contains a review of Barnard's work by Lindley. The volume was one of a series honouring Bayesian heroes. Barnard was not a Bayesian but he was a "great guy"!
In 1990 he made a book out of manuscripts left by his friend Egon Pearson
- E. S. Pearson (1990) ‘Student’, A Statistical Biography of William Sealy Gosset, Edited and Augmented by R. L. Plackett with the Assistance of G. A. Barnard, Oxford: University Press.
After 1990 Barnard published little, although he kept up his letter writing. In 1996 however he produced a review of Barndorff-Nielsen and Cox
- Review of Inference and Asymptotics. by O. E. Barndorff-Nielsen; D. R. CoxDavid Cox (statistician)Sir David Roxbee Cox FRS is a prominent British statistician.-Early years:Cox studied mathematics at St. John's College, Cambridge and obtained his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1949, advised by Henry Daniels and Bernard Welch.-Career:He was employed from 1944 to 1946 at the Royal Aircraft...
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, 159, (1996), 178-179.
After observing that, “A great virtue of the book is that it raises perhaps as many questions as it answers,” Barnard went on to give his answer one of those questions.
External links
- Briefer obituary by Lindley in IMS Bulletin Obituary on p. 8
- George Alfred Barnard portrait on the Portraits of Statisticians page.
- Statistical Inference and Analysis, Selected Correspondence of R.A. Fisher Edited by J.H. Bennett. Barnard’s correspondence with Fisher
- School Debate 1932. Barnard the school debater
- A Conversation with V.P. Godambe. Barnard the PhD supervisor
- London Review of Books, 29 July 1999. Barnard the letter writer
