Bradley Efron

Efron was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in May 1938, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Esther and Miles Efron.{{cite web|title=Efron to Speak on Baseball, Shakespeare, and Modern Statistical Theory|year=2007|website=Joint Mathematics Meetings 2007|publisher=American Mathematical Society|url=https://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm/2098_intro.html}} He attended the California Institute of Technology, graduating in mathematics in 1960. By his own admission he "had no talent for modern abstract math". His interest in statistics emerged after reading a Harald Cramér book cover to cover.McClave, James T., and Terry Sincich. "Statistics, 1 1t h Edition." (2009). Soon later, he arrived at Stanford in fall of 1960, earning his Ph.D., under the direction of Rupert Miller and Herbert Solomon, in the Department of Statistics. While at Stanford, he was suspended for six months for his involvement with the Stanford Chaparral's parody of Playboy magazine.{{cite web|

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title = Guide to the Hammer and Coffin Society Records, 1906–1987|

publisher = Online Archive of California}}{{cite journal|

title = Bradley Efron|

journal = Significance

| doi=10.1111/j.1740-9713.2010.00460.x

|volume=7

|issue = 4|year=2010

|pages=178–181

|author=Champkin Julian|s2cid = 247667658}}

He is currently a professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at Stanford. At Stanford he has been the Chair of the Department of Statistics, Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, Chairman of the University Advisory Board, Chair of the Faculty Senate, and co-director of the undergraduate-level Mathematical & Computational Science Program.

Efron holds the Max H. Stein endowed chair as Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.

He has made many important contributions to many areas of statistics. Efron's work has spanned both theoretical and applied topics, including empirical Bayes analysis (with Carl Morris), applications of differential geometry to statistical inference, the analysis of survival data, and inference for microarray gene expression data.{{cite book|author = Bradley Efron|title = Large-Scale Inference: Empirical Bayes Methods for Estimation, Testing, and Prediction|publisher = Institute of Mathematical Statistics Monographs/Cambridge University Press|year = 2010|isbn=9780521192491}} He is the author of a classic monograph, The Jackknife, the Bootstrap and Other Resampling Plans (1982) and has also co-authored (with Robert Tibshirani) the text An Introduction to the Bootstrap (1994).

He created a set of intransitive dice called Efron's dice.{{cite web |last1=Weisstein |first1=Eric W. |title=Efron's Dice |url=https://mathworld.wolfram.com/EfronsDice.html |website=mathworld.wolfram.com |access-date=12 January 2021 |language=en}}{{cite web |title=Non-transitive Dice |url=https://www.cut-the-knot.org/Probability/NonTransitiveDice.shtml |website=www.cut-the-knot.org}}{{cite journal |last1=Savage |first1=Richard P. |title=The Paradox of Nontransitive Dice |journal=The American Mathematical Monthly |date=May 1994 |volume=101 |issue=5 |pages=429–436 |doi=10.2307/2974903 |jstor=2974903 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2974903}}

{{cite journal |last1=Rump |first1=Christopher M. |title=Strategies for Rolling the Efron Dice |journal=Mathematics Magazine |date=June 2001 |volume=74 |issue=3 |pages=212–216 |doi=10.2307/2690722 |jstor=2690722 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2690722 |access-date=12 January 2021}}

He has been given many honors, including a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Lester R. Ford Award,{{cite journal|author=Efron, Bradley|title=Controversies in the Foundations of Statistics|journal=Amer. Math. Monthly|year=1978|volume=85|issue=4|pages=231–246|url=http://www.maa.org/programs/maa-awards/writing-awards/controversies-in-the-foundations-of-statistics|doi=10.2307/2321163|jstor=2321163}} the Wilks Medal, the Parzen Prize, and the Rao Prize, Fisher, Rietz, and Wald lecturer.{{Cite web |url=http://www.imstat.org/awards/lectures.htm |title=Awards - Special Lectures Info, Institute of Mathematical Statistics |access-date=2015-01-31 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150221081412/http://www.imstat.org/awards/lectures.htm |archive-date=2015-02-21 |url-status=dead }}

In 2005, he was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor by the United States, for his exceptional work in the field of Statistics (especially for his inventing of the bootstrapping methodology).{{cite web|url=https://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/recip_details.cfm?recip_id=5300000000429|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121016083947/https://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/recip_details.cfm?recip_id=5300000000429|archive-date=2012-10-16|work=The President's National Medal of Science: Recipient Details|title=Bradley Efron|publisher=National Science Foundation|url-status=dead}} He was presented with the award on May 29, 2007.{{cite web|url=https://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/2005nmslaureates_pressrelease.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160107133525/https://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/2005nmslaureates_pressrelease.pdf|archive-date=2016-01-07|title=President Bush announces the recipients of the 2005 National Medal of Science|publisher=Office of Science and Technology Policy|via=National Science Foundation|date=May 29, 2007|url-status=dead}}

In 2014, he was awarded the Guy Medal in Gold.

He has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category jointly with David Cox, for the development of “pioneering and hugely influential” statistical methods that have proved indispensable for obtaining reliable results in a vast spectrum of disciplines from medicine to astrophysics, genomics, and particle physics.

He received the International Prize in Statistics at the 2019 World Statistics Congress.{{cite web|url=http://statprize.org/index.cfm|title=International Prize in Statistics Awarded to Stanford's Bradley Efron|date=2018-11-12}}{{cite journal|title=Keystone pipeline blocked, statistics prize and horse cull|journal=Nature|date=14 November 2018 |pages=298–299|volume=563|issue=7731|doi=10.1038/d41586-018-07349-2|pmid=30429573|bibcode=2018Natur.563..298.|doi-access=free}}

• {{cite journal

|last1=Efron |first1=B.

|last2=Hinkley |first2=D. V. |author-link2=David V. Hinkley

|year=1978

|title=Assessing the accuracy of the maximum likelihood estimator: Observed versus expected Fisher Information

|journal=Biometrika

|volume=65 |issue=3 |pages=457–487

|doi=10.1093/biomet/65.3.457

|mr=0521817

|jstor=2335893

}}

• {{cite journal

|author = Bradley Efron

|title = Bootstrap Methods: Another Look at the Jackknife

|journal = The Annals of Statistics

|volume = 7

|issue = 1

|year = 1979

|pages = 1–26

|doi = 10.1214/aos/1176344552

|doi-access = free

}}

• Efron, B. (1979). [http://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/1021092?journalCode=siread "Computers and the theory of statistics: thinking the unthinkable"]. SIAM Review.
• {{cite journal | author = Efron B | year = 1981 | title = Nonparametric estimates of standard error: The jackknife, the bootstrap and other methods | journal = Biometrika | volume = 68 | issue = 3| pages = 589–599 | doi=10.1093/biomet/68.3.589}}
• Efron, B. (1982). [https://books.google.com/books?id=JukZvUd4CAcC "The jackknife, the bootstrap, and other resampling plans"]. Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics CBMS-NSF Monographs, 38.
• Diaconis, P. & Efron, B. (1983). "Computer-intensive methods in statistics". Scientific American, May, 116–130.
• Efron, B. (1983). "Estimating the error rate of a prediction rule: improvement on cross-validation". Journal of the American Statistical Association
• Efron, B. (1985). "Bootstrap confidence intervals for a class of parametric problems." Biometrika.
• Efron, B. (1987). "Better bootstrap confidence intervals". Journal of the American Statistical Association
• Efron, B. (1990). "More efficient bootstrap computations". Journal of the American Statistical Association
• Efron, B. (1991). "Regression percentiles using asymmetric squared error loss". Statistica sinica.
• Efron, B. (1992). "Jackknife-after-bootstrap standards errors and influence functions". in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
• Efron, B., & Tibshirani, R. J. (1993). "An introduction to the bootstrap". New York: Chapman & Hall, [https://archive.today/20120712124533/http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/S/bootstrap.funs software].
• {{cite book|author = Bradley Efron|author2=Robert Tibshirani |title = An Introduction to the Bootstrap|publisher = Chapman & Hall/CRC|year = 1994| isbn=978-0-412-04231-7|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gLlpIUxRntoC|author2-link=Robert Tibshirani }}
• {{cite book|author = Bradley Efron|author2=Trevor Hastie |title = Computer Age Statistical Inference |publisher = Cambridge University Press|year = 2016| isbn=9781107149892|url=https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI/|author2-link=Trevor Hastie }}

{{Div col|colwidth=20em}}

• Clinical trials
• Empirical Bayesian
• Fisher, Ronald
• Least-angle regression
• Fisher information
• Hinkley, David V.
• Likelihood function
• Observed information
• Robbins, Herbert
• Sequential analysis
• Stein, Charles

{{div col end}}

{{reflist}}

• Personal home page: https://efron.ckirby.su.domains
• [http://projecteuclid.org/Dienst/UI/1.0/Journal?authority=euclid.ss&issue=1063994964 Statistical Science Silver Anniversary issue on Bootstrap, including interview with Efron]
• {{MathGenealogy |id=14941 }}

{{Winners of the National Medal of Science|math-stat-comp}}

{{Guy Medal}}

{{American Statistical Association Presidents}}

{{Statistics}}

{{Authority control}}

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Category:1938 births

Category:American bioinformaticians

Category:American biostatisticians

Category:Fellows of the American Statistical Association

Category:Living people

Category:National Medal of Science laureates

Category:MacArthur Fellows

Category:People from Saint Paul, Minnesota

Category:Presidents of the American Statistical Association

Category:Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences

Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent

Category:Stanford University Department of Statistics faculty

Category:American mathematical statisticians

Category:Computational statisticians