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Pearson was certainly impressed with David and he offered her a research assistant position in University College London. Her first publication, written jointly with Pearson and S A Stouffer, appeared in Biometrika in 1932. In that year Wilks and Churchill Eisenhart visited London and together with David attended Fisher 's lectures. David, being a woman, was not allowed to ask any questions and she certainly felt that questions needed to be asked after what she considered were awful lectures :
After Pearson had arranged for the research assistant position to be extended, David was offered an assistant lectureship in statistics at University College London following Pearson 's retirement in 1935. She accepted the post and taught there while continuing to undertake research in statistics. It was Neyman who insisted that she complete a doctorate. In 1938 she was awarded a Ph.D. in statistics and continued to teach at University College until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. During the war she undertook work as an Experimental Officer in the Ordnance Board for the Ministry of Supply, a Senior Statistician for the Research and Experiments Department for the Ministry of Home Security, a Member of the Land Mines Committee of the Scientific Advisory Council, and as a Scientific Advisor on Mines to the Military Experimental Establishment. Of course her statistical expertise meant that her skills were much in demand to help with the war effort. On the one hand David felt that the opportunities which World War II opened up for women were extremely valuable. On the other hand the obituary in the Daily Telegraph stated that:
When the war ended David returned to University College London to resume her lecturing post, now as a lecturer. She was promoted to a readership on the strength of her achievements in research in statistics and then in 1962 she was promoted to Professor of Statistics. Before this she supervised John G Saw's doctoral thesis on Estimating and Testing Techniques with Ordered Variables Applied to Censored Samples. His degree was awarded in 1959. David remained at University College London until 1967. During this period she received many honours. In particular she was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1954, and a Member of the International Statistical Institute. She served on the University Senate of University College, and was also a Governor of Bedford College for Women. David was appointed as a visiting professor and research statistician at the Department of Statistics and Applied Climatology and Forestry Division at the University of California, Berkeley. It was in 1948 that David had made her first visit to California and after that she regularly taught summer schools at Berkeley. She purchased a house, jointly with Evelyn Fix, in Kensington near Berkeley in 1961. In 1967 David joined the University of California at Riverside and in the following year she was appointed to the Chair of Biostatistics in the newly established Department of Biostatistics. The Department was renamed the Department of Statistics in 1970 and David became the Chair of Statistics. However :
She explained in :
It is worth noting that she served as the Review Editor for Biometrics from 1972 to 1976. After holding the Chair of Statistics at Riverside for seven years, during which time she returned to her home in Kensington every weekend, she retired in 1977 and became Professor Emeritus and Research Associate in Biostatistics at the University of California at Berkeley. She continued to work as a consultant with the United States Forestry Service. David was renowned as a teacher as well as a researcher. In 1970-71 she received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California at Riverside. In August 1992 she received the Elizabeth L Scott Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies for her:
David died of lung cancer at the age of 83 at her home in Kensington, in Contra Costa County, California. In 2001 the Florence Nightingale David Award was established to be awarded to a:
Let us look at a few examples of David's contributions to statistics. We can only examine a few since she wrote nine books and over 100 papers. David published Tables of the ordinates and probability integral of the distribution of the correlation coefficient in small samples in 1938. In the following year she published On Neyman's "smooth" test for goodness of fit in Biometrika . This paper throws light on what constitutes a large sample for Neyman 's criterion of smoothness of fit of order k. After she returned to University College after World War II she published A power function for tests of randomness in a sequence of alternatives and A c2'smooth' test for goodness of fit which both appeared in Biometrika in 1947. The first investigates the behaviour of the nonparametric test for randomness based on the number of alternations of an event and its complement in a series of trials. In the second David examines the signs of the deviations from expected numbers to see whether they change sufficiently often. In 1949 David published Probability Theory for Statistical Methods, an elementary textbook in the theory of probability for students of statistics. Wolfowitz , reviewing the text, writes:
In 1962 David published Games, gods and gambling which many regard as her most significant book. It presents a history of probability and statistical ideas and was republished by Dover Publications in 1998. Also in 1962 she published Elementary statistical exercises written jointly with Egon Pearson . In the following year she published Combinatorial chance written jointly with David E Barton. In the book the authors write:
But Birnbaum writes in his review of the book:
David and Barton wrote a paper in 1966 which, since the archive is based in Scotland, we must mention. This is A persistence problem in renewal theory : Robert the Bruce's spider. In this they looked at the problem of Robert the Bruce's spider. They assume it attempted to climb a smooth wall at unit speed. The distribution of the height it reached before slipping back to the floor is exponential. After slipping, it rested for a fixed time and then restarted its climb. In the paper the density of the total time required for the spider to successfully climb the wall is calculated. Also in 1966 David and Barton, together with Maurice Kendall , published Symmetric function and allied tables. A symmetric function of n variables is one which remains unchanged when any pair of variables are interchanged. For example x + y + z, xyz and xy + yz + zx are symmetric functions of three variables. Siddiqui, in reviewing the text, writes:
Some of David's work was directed towards applications of statistics to ecology. For example in 1972 David published Measurement of diversity and we present her own summary of the work:
David Barton describes David's character in :
Utts writes in :
Source:School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland |