Quick Facts
Biography
Stephen Mack Stigler (born August 10, 1941) is Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of Statistics of the University of Chicago. He has authored several books on the history of statistics.
Stigler is also known for Stigler's law of eponymy which states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer (whose first formulation he credits to sociologist Robert K. Merton).
Biography
Stigler was born in Minneapolis. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation was on linear functions of order statistics, and his advisor was Lucien Le Cam. His research has focused on statistical theory of robust estimators and the history of statistics. He is also known for Stigler's law of eponymy.
Stigler taught at University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1979 when he joined the University of Chicago. In 2006 he was elected to membership of the American Philosophical Society, and is a past president (1994) of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
His father was the economist George Stigler, and he has recently written on Milton Friedman, who was a friend of his father.