Analysis Of The Lady Tasting Tea

The Lady Tasting Tea

The different tastes between pouring milk into tea or tea into milk raised R.A. Fisher’s interest to design an experiment for testing the lady. Dr. David Salsburg used this famous anecdote as the book title, and elaborated the development of modern statistics by several stories. Each chapter contains one outstanding statistician and his/her contributions. Impressively, the whole book was linked by R.A. Fisher, K. Pearson, E. Pearson and J. Neyman, these exclusively distinguished statistician, which indicates their fame and masterpiece has great impact on not only statistics but also academia of science, even our daily life.

Probability defined by Aristotle, “improbable things will happen”. Later on, the probability and

Savage and Bruno de Finetti, the confidence interval was justified by the Bayesian theory of personal probability. Bayes’s theorem is separated from Pearson’s probability, and the idea of inverse probability is sort of taboo in statistics academia. That is the reason why confidence interval was disregarded by the chair. The personal probability and Bayesian Hierarchical model are two approaches more and more prevalent than Pearson’s age.

Kolmogorov furthered the probability and statistics into real life and made it more suitable than “pure” mathematics. He inaugurated the axiomization of probability theory and setup the abstract space of elementary things as “events”. This practical axiom made forward movement of probability measurement in reality.

After reading this book, I am touched by the underlying philosophy of statistics. Various theories and models are introduced in this book. During the progress of the development, controversies and confits among these theories are largely attributable to diversity of ideology and doctrine from their establishers. In future, the statistics might evolve into a new era and the vogue methods, like p-value or confidence interval, might be discarded. I am looking forward to witness how statistics make our lives