The Lady Tasting Tea

Vorlage:Infobox Book The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century (ISBN 0-8050-7134-2) is a book by David Salsburg about the history of modern statistics and the role it played in the development of science and industry.

The title comes from the "lady tasting tea", an example from the famous book, Statistical methods for research workers, by Ronald A. Fisher. Regarding Fisher's example, the statistician D. Basu wrote that "the famous case of the 'lady tasting tea'" was "one of the two supporting pillars . . . of the randomization analysis of experimental data".

Quotation from the publisher

At a summer tea party in Cambridge, England, a lady states that tea poured into milk tastes differently than that of milk poured into tea. Her notion is shouted down by the scientific minds of the group. But one guest, by the name Ronald Aylmer Fisher, proposes to scientifically test the lady's hypothesis. There was no better person to conduct such a test, for Fisher had brought to the field of statistics an emphasis on controlling the methods for obtaining data and the importance of interpretation. He knew that how the data was gathered and applied was as important as the data themselves.
In The Lady Tasting Tea, readers will encounter not only R.A. Fisher's theories (and their repercussions), but the ideas of dozens of men and women whose revolutionary work affects our everyday lives. Salsburg traces the rise and fall of Karl Pearson's theories, explores W. Edwards Deming's statistical methods of quality control (which rebuilt postwar Japan's economy), and relates the story of Stella Cunliffe's early work on the capacity of small beer casks at the Guinness brewing factory. The Lady Tasting Tea is not a book of dry facts and figures, but the history of great individuals who dared to look at the world in a new way.

External links

• Publisher's web page