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The Lady Tasting Te Summary

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The Lady Tasting Tea: Summary of the book

The lady tasting tea takes the reader on a fascinating trip in the history of the statistical revolution. The contributions of many brilliant minds to the field of statistics as well as their personal lives and historical perspectives were described.

The story began in a sunny afternoon in Cambridge in the 1920s. A group of scientists was having a tea party when a lady claimed that there was a difference in taste between the cups where tea was poured into milk and the cups where milk was poured into tea. Sir Ronald Fisher who became a famous statistician suggested an experiment to test the lady’s hypothesis. The story then goes to the 1890s when the statistical revolution started. Karl Pearson was considered by many as the founder of mathematical statistics. Pearson discovered the skew distributions stating that they would cover any type of data scatter and he described these distributions by four numbers; mean, standard deviation, kurtosis and symmetry. Later a Polish mathematician, Jerzy Neyman showed that Pearson’s skew distributions can not be used to explain all possible distributions. Sir Francis Galton who discovered fingerprints was also interested in statistics and he founded a biometrical laboratory to measure height and weights in families to find a mathematical formula that predict the height of children from the heights of their parents. He described regression to the mean where heights of the children moved away from

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