Frederick Mosteller
| Fred Mosteller | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 24, 1916 Clarksburg, West Virginia, U.S. |
| Died | July 23, 2006 (aged 89) Arlington, Virginia, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Statistician |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Alma mater |
Carnegie Institute of Technology Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Samuel S. Wilks and John Tukey |
| Doctoral students | Stephen Fienberg |
| Known for | Statistics education |
Charles Frederick Mosteller (December 24, 1916 – July 23, 2006), usually known as Frederick Mosteller, was 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.
Frederick Mosteller was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, on December 24, 1916 to Helen Kelley Mosteller and William Roy Mosteller. His father was a highway builder. He was raised near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). He completed his ScM degree at Carnegie Tech in 1939, and enrolled at Princeton University in 1939 to work on a PhD with statistician Samuel S. Wilks.
In 1941 he married Virginia Gilroy, whom he met during college. They had two children: Bill (b. 1947) and Gale (b. 1953). They lived in Belmont, Mass. and spent summers in West Falmouth, Mass. on Cape Cod.
Mosteller worked in Samuel Wilks's Statistical Research Group in New York city during World War II on statistical questions about airborne bombing. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1946.
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