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Carlo Emilio Bonferroni

Carlo Emilio Bonferroni (1892–1960) was born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1892. Before enrolling in the mathematics department at the University of Turin, he studied conducting and the piano at the Music Conservatory of Turin. Bonferroni, like many men of his generation, fought in World War I, during which he was part of The Engineer Corps of the Italian Army.

After the war, Bonferroni was appointed as an assistant professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin. He taught geometry, mechanics, and analysis. In 1923, he moved to Bari and began teaching at the Economics Institute, where he got to teach financial mathematics, a topic that was of great interest to him. In 1933, Bonferroni moved to Florence, where he was chair of the mathematics department until his death in 1960.

Bonferroni's interests had a large breadth. He published on actuarial mathematics, probability, statistics, analysis, geometry, and mechanics. His work on probability inequalities has been applied to simultaneous statistical inference. However, the app lication of Bonferroni’s theory to the construction of confidence intervals is the work of Olive Jean Dunn.

Olive Jean Dunn

Olive Jean Dunn (1915–2008) obtained her bachelor's degree in 1936, her master's degree in 1951, and her PhD in 1956, all from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). After spending one year as an assistant professor at Iowa State College, she returned to UCLA to serve in the biostatistics and preventive medicine and health departments. She remained at UCLA for the rest of her career.

Dunn is best known for her application of Bonferroni's inequalities to construct corrections to confidence intervals for multiple comparisons. Although the literature refers to it as the Bonferroni correction, it is Dunn who developed the application we use today.

Dunn is also well known for her textbooks Basic Statistics: A Primer for the Biomedical Sciences, written in 1977 with later editions co-authored with Virginia A. Clark, and Applied Statistics: An Analysis of Variance and Regression, which was also co-authored with Clark.

In 1968, Dunn became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. She also was a fellow of the American Public Health Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1974, she was awarded the honor of UCLA Woman of Science.

Clive William John Granger

Clive William John Granger (1934–2009) was born in Swansea, Wales, and earned degrees in mathematics and statistics at the University of Nottingham. Joining the staff there, he also worked at Princeton on the spectral analysis of economic time series before moving in 1974 to the University of California, San Diego. He was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics for methods of analyzing economic time series with common trends (cointegration). He was knighted in 2005, thus becoming Sir Clive Granger.

Eliakim Hastings Moore

Eliakim Hastings Moore (1862–1932) was born in Marietta, Ohio. He studied mathematics and astronomy at Yale and was awarded a PhD for a thesis on n-dimensional geometry. After a year studying in Germany and teaching posts at Northwestern and Yale, he settled at the University of Chicago in 1892. Moore worked on algebra, including fields and groups, the foundations of geometry and the foundations of analysis, algebraic geometry, number theory, and integral equations. He was an inspiring teacher and a great organizer in American mathematics, playing an important part in the early years of the American Mathematical Society.

Issai Schur

Issai Schur (1875–1941) was born in Mogilev, which is now in Belarus. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin, where Frobenius was one of his teachers. Schur obtained his doctorate with a thesis on rational representations of the general linear group over the complex field. Thereafter, he taught and researched at Berlin University (with an interval in Bonn) until he was dismissed by the Nazis in 1935. He was a superb lecturer. Schur is now known mainly for his fundamental contributions to the representation theory of groups, but he also worked in other areas of algebra, including matrices, number theory, and analysis. In 1939, he emigrated to Palestine, where he later died in poverty.