Chester Ittner Bliss

Chester Ittner Bliss was primarily a biologist, who is best known for his contributions to statistics. He was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1899 and died in 1979. He was the first secretary of the International Biometric Society.

For the American politician, see Chester Bliss Bowles.

Academic qualifications

Remarkably, his statistical knowledge was largely self-taught and developed according to the problems he wanted to solve (Cochran & Finney 1979). Nevertheless, in 1942 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[1]

Major contributions

Arguably his most important contribution was the development, with Ronald Fisher, of an iterative approach to finding maximum likelihood estimates in the probit method of bioassay. Additional contributions in biological assay were work on the analysis of time-mortality data and of slope-ratio assays (Cochran & Finney 1979).

Bliss introduced the word rankit, meaning an expected normal order statistic.

References

Citations
  1. View/Search Fellows of the ASA, accessed 2016-07-23.

Sources
  • C. I. Bliss (1935) The calculation of the dosage-mortality curve, Annals of Applied Biology 22, 134–167. (includes appendix by Fisher.)
  • W. G. Cochran, D. J. Finney. 1979 Chester Ittner Bliss, 1899–1979, Biometrics; 35(4): 715–717. pdf
  • D. J. Finney. 1980 Chester Ittner Bliss, 1899–1979, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 143(1): 92–93.
  • T. R. Holford & C. White (2005) Bliss, Chester Ittner, Encyclopedia of Biostatistics.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.