Statistical science as organized in formal academic departments is relatively new. With a few exceptions, most Statistics and Biostatistics departments have been created within the past 60 years. This book consists of a set of memoirs, one for each department in the U.S. created by the mid-1960s. The memoirs describe key aspects of the department’s history -- its founding, its growth, key people in its development, success stories (such as major research accomplishments) and the occasional failure story, PhD graduates who have had a significant impact, its impact on statistical education, and a summary of where the department stands today and its vision for the future. Read here all about how departments such as at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford started and how they got to where they are today. The book should also be of interests to scholars in the field of disciplinary history.

Many countries have implemented policies to increase the number and quality of scientific researchers as a means to foster innovation and spur economic development and progress. To that end, grounded in a view of women as a rich, yet underutilized knowledge and labor resource, a great deal of recent attention has focused on encouraging women to pursue education and careers in science — even in countries with longstanding dominant patriarchal regimes. Yet, overall, science remains an area in which girls and women are persistently disadvantaged. This book addresses that situation. It bridges the gap between individual- and societal-level perspectives on women in science in a search for systematic solutions to the challenge of building an inclusive and productive scientific workforce capable of creating the innovation needed for economic growth and societal wellbeing. This book examines both the role of gender as an organizing principle of social life and the relative position of women scientists within national and international labor markets. Weaving together and engaging research on globalization, the social organization of science, and gendered societal relations as key social forces, this book addresses critical issues affecting women’s contributions and participation in science. Also, while considering women’s representation in science as a whole, examinations of women in the chemical sciences, computing, mathematics and statistics are offered as examples to provide insights into how differing disciplinary cultures, functional tasks and socio-historical conditions can affect the advancement of women in science relative to important variations in educational and occupational realities. Edited by three social scientists recognized for their expertise in science and technology policy, education, workforce participation, and stratification, this book includes contributions from an intellectually diverse group of international scholars and analysts and features compelling cases and initiatives from around the world, with implications for research, industry practice, education and policy development.

The first history of postwar mathematics, offering a new interpretation of the rise of abstraction and axiomatics in the twentieth century. Why did abstraction dominate American art, social science, and natural science in the mid-twentieth century? Why, despite opposition, did abstraction and theoretical knowledge flourish across a diverse set of intellectual pursuits during the Cold War? In recovering the centrality of abstraction across a range of modernist projects in the United States, Alma Steingart brings mathematics back into the conversation about midcentury American intellectual thought. The expansion of mathematics in the aftermath of World War II, she demonstrates, was characterized by two opposing tendencies: research in pure mathematics became increasingly abstract and rarified, while research in applied mathematics and mathematical applications grew in prominence as new fields like operations research and game theory brought mathematical knowledge to bear on more domains of knowledge. Both were predicated on the same abstractionist conception of mathematics and were rooted in the same approach: modern axiomatics. For American mathematicians, the humanities and the sciences did not compete with one another, but instead were two complementary sides of the same epistemological commitment. Steingart further reveals how this mathematical epistemology influenced the sciences and humanities, particularly the postwar social sciences. As mathematics changed, so did the meaning of mathematization. Axiomatics focuses on American mathematicians during a transformative time, following a series of controversies among mathematicians about the nature of mathematics as a field of study and as a body of knowledge. The ensuing debates offer a window onto the postwar development of mathematics band Cold War epistemology writ large. As Steingart’s history ably demonstrates, mathematics is the social activity in which styles of truth—here, abstraction—become synonymous with ways of knowing.

An expanded narrative of the rich, unique history of the University of Chicago. One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than one hundred and fifty countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting. With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College from 1992 to 2023, thoroughly engages with the history and the lived politics of the university. Boyer presents a history of a complex academic community, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the university to sustain itself through decades of change. He has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact. Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community. Boyer’s tale is filled with larger-than-life characters—John D. Rockefeller, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and many other famous figures among them—and episodes that reveal the establishment and rise of today’s institution. Newly updated, this edition extends through the presidency of Robert Zimmer, whose long tenure was marked by significant developments and controversies over subjects as varied as free speech, medical inequity, and community relations.

Commissioned by the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC), Statistics in Action: A Canadian Outlook helps both general readers and users of statistics better appreciate the scope and importance of statistics. It presents the ways in which statistics is used while highlighting key contributions that Canadian statisticians are making to science, techno

The term "soft power" describes a country's ability to get what it wants by attracting rather than coercing others - by engaging hearts and minds through cultural and political values and foreign policies that other countries see as legitimate and conducive to their own interests.This book analyzes the soft power assets of the United States and Japan, and how they contributed to one of the most successful, if unlikely, bilateral relationships of the twentieth century. Sponsored by the U.S. Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership, the book brings together anthropologists, political scientists, historians, economists, diplomats, and others to explore the multiple axes of soft power that operate in the U.S.-Japanese relationship, and between the United States and Japan and other regions of the world.The contributors move beyond an "either-or" concept of hard versus soft power to a more dynamic interpretation, and demonstrate the important role of non-state actors in wielding soft power. They show how public diplomacy on both sides of the Pacific - bolstered by less formal influences such as popular cultural icons, product brands, martial arts, baseball, and educational exchanges - has led to a vibrant U.S.-Japanese relationship since World War II despite formidable challenges. Emphasizing the essentially interactive nature of persuasion, the book highlights an approach to soft power that has many implications for the world today.

In this important and timely work, Graham and Diamond reassess the success of American universities as research institutions and the role of public funding in their developmentfrom the expansionist golden yearsof the 1950s and '60s, through the austerity measures of the 1970s and the entrepreneurial ethos of the 1980s, to the budget crises universities face in the 1990s.

The growth of education systems and the construction of the state have always been connected. The processes of governing education systems always utilized data through a range of administrative records, pupil testing, efficiency surveys and international projects. By the late twentieth century, quantitative data had gained enormous influence in education systems through the work of the OECD, the European Commission and national system agencies. The creation and flow of data has become a powerful governing tool in education. Comparison between pupils, costs, regions and states has grown ever more important. The visualization of this data, and its range of techniques, has changed over time, especially in its movement from an expert to a public act. Data began to be explained to a widening audience to shape its behaviours and its institutions. The use of data in education systems and the procedures by which the data are constructed has not been a major part of the study of education, nor of the histories of education systems. This volume of contributions, drawn from different times and spaces in education, will be a useful contribution to comparative historical studies.