3/ His book ‘The Foundations of Statistics’ introduced Bayesian hypothesis tests and Bayesian estimation, leading to what Kruskal called “difficulties” with anti-Bayesian colleagues at Chicago

2/ Expelled from U Michigan b/c his poor eyesight made him a menace in chemistry lab, he was later reinstated & blossomed after switching to pure maths. Worked at the Statistical Research Group with John von Neumann & Columbia University during WW2.

2/ Founded first dept of clinical epidemiology in Canada at McMaster University, and the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine #CEBM. His major contributions to research methodology include methods for detection & reduction of bias, & the design, conduct, & reporting of clinical trials.

6/ Gresham College has been providing free public education across the arts and sciences since 1597 when Sir Thomas Gresham's executors founded the college to bring the ‘new learning’ to Londoners in English rather than Latin (the language of universities for most of Europe at that time)

5/ Not surprisingly the numbers of students increased five to ten-fold in the first couple of years.

4/ He scattered 10,000 pennies all over the lecture room floor and asked his students to pick them up and arrange them in heads or tails: 'The result was very nearly half heads and half tails, thus proving the law of averages and probability'.

3/ His methods for teaching probability were amazing. A lecture on experimental deductions involved 16,178 throws of the ball at the Monte Carlo Roulette table & 2138 lottery tickets.

2/ He starts by suggesting a visit to the market to check out “fish, vegetable marrow, screws & tennis bats” to grasp the concept of patterns of variation. The 2nd lecture involves “applications of geometry to statistical data”, what we now call data visualization and graphical statistics

2/ He demonstrated his calculator before the Royal Society 1 Feb 1673. Although he apparently received “much encouragement”, Robert Hooke was quite rude & Jonathan Swift found it absolutely hilarious, later mocking it & the Royal Society in Gulliver’s Travels 1726

2/The 1756 4th edition of his 1738 book The Doctrine of Chances includes the first formal statement of the normal distribution. The formula did not look like it does now because at the time there was no standard notation for the constant e=2.71828 & no idea of standard deviation σ.

2/His matrix decomposition method for solving systems of n linear equations was published posthumously. Thirty years later in 1948 Alan Turing demonstrates the stability of the method for large-n machine computations

2/ He was the son of statistician Louis-Adolphe & brother of Alphonse, creator of the Bertillon biometric method & inventor of the mugshot. Here is Jacques’ mugshot

2/ The Hawthorne Effect describes the phenomenon of subjects changing their behavior in response to being under observation rather than to the manipulation itself. Reanalysis of the original data suggests evidence for the Effect was surprisingly weak and ambiguous.