The Lady Tasting Tea – How statistics revolutionized science in the twentieth century. (Book Review)

Title :- The Lady Tasting Tea – How statistics revolutionized science in the twentieth century.

By :- David Salsburg

Published :- Henry Holt and Co, New York (2001) Paperback (320 pages).

Outline :- A story telling history of the development of statistics. An easy to read and most entertaining enlightenment on what appears to be a dry topic.

 

For example ;

“Florence Nightingale, a legendary English Victorian figure, was a terror to the members of Parliament and the British army generals whom she confronted. There is a tendency to think of her simply as the founder of the nursing profession, a gentle, self sacrificing giver of mercy, but the real Florence Nightingale was a woman with a mission. She was also a self educated statistician. One of Nightingales missions was to force the British army to maintain field hospitals and supply nursing and medical care to soldiers on the field. To support her position, she plowed through piles of data from army files. She then appeared before a royal commission with a remarkable series of graphs. In them she showed how most of the deaths in the British army during the Crimean War were due to illness contracted outside the field of battle, or that occurred long after action as a result of wounds suffered in battle but left unattended. She invented the pie chart as a means of displaying her message.”