Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown by Judith M. Tanur (Author), Frederick Mosteller (Author), William H. Kruskal (Author), Richard F. Link, Erich Leo Lehmann and two more This collection of intriguing essays describes important applications of statistics and probability in many fields. Instead of teaching methods, the essays illustrate past accomplishments and current uses of statistics and probability. Surveys, questionnaires, experiments, and observational studies are also presented to help the student better understand the importance of the influence of statistics on each topic covered within the separate essays. Judith M. Tanur is an American statistician and sociologist who is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita of Sociology at Stony Brook University. Judith Tanur was born to Edward Mark and Libbie Berman Mark on August 12, 1935 in Jersey City, New Jersey. When Tanur was young, her family moved from New Jersey, where she was born, to Great Neck, New York. She graduated from Great Neck High School in 1953 and entered Antioch College, studying psychology and statistics there, but in 1955 she transferred to Columbia University, in part because it was closer to the University of Pennsylvania where her future husband was studying dentistry. At the same time, she took a job at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Tanur completed a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1957 and began graduate studies at Penn, but became pregnant and dropped out. Eventually, she returned to graduate school, completed a master's degree in mathematical statistics from Columbia University in 1963, and took a new job as an editor for William Kruskal at the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. She became a lecturer at Stony Brook in 1968, still only holding a master's degree, and later completed her Ph.D. in sociology at Stony Brook. Charles Frederick Mosteller (December 24, 1916 - July 23, 2006), usually known as Frederick Mosteller, was one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century. He was the founding chairman of Harvard's statistics department, from 1957 to 1971, and served as the president of several professional bodies including the Psychometric Society, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Statistical Institute. William Henry "Bill" Kruskal ( October 10, 1919 - April 21, 2005) was an American mathematician and statistician. He is best known for having formulated the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance (together with W. Allen Wallis), a widely used nonparametric statistical method. Erich Leo Lehmann (20 November 1917 - 12 September 2009) was an American statistician, who made a major contribution to nonparametric hypothesis testing. He is one of the eponyms of the Lehmann-Scheffé theorem and of the Hodges-Lehmann estimator of the median of a population. Lehmann obtained his MA in mathematics in 1942 and his PhD (under Jerzy Neyman) in 1946, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1942. From August 1944 to August 1945 he worked as an operations analyst for the United States Air Force on Guam. He taught at Columbia University and at Princeton University during 1950-51, and then during 1951-1952 he was a visiting associate professor at Stanford University. He was an editor of "The Annals of Mathematical Statistics" and president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. This work was first conceived and published by Frederick Holden Murphy.