Roots of the Iowa State Statistical Center

Roots of the Iowa State Statistical Center T. A. Bancroft, Professor Emeritus [Former Director of the Statistical Laboratory (est. 1933) and Head of the Department of Statistics (est. 1947) from 1950 to 1972] (1) Early Developments: Teaching, Consulting and Cooperative Research 1914-1941. Courses, essentially statistical in nature, were offered by the Department of Mathematics beginning in 1914 and by the Department of Economics beginning in 1915. George W. Snedecor, who had joined the faculty at Iowa State in 1913, undertook the responsibility for the teaching of statistics in Mathematics. However, those interested in taking or auditing these courses were primarily graduate students, teachers, and research workers in substantive fields in Agriculture. In particular, such staff and students in the plant and animal sciences and genetics were discovering the importance of statistical methods in their research investigations. As a consequence of these consider­ations, and his own interests, Snedecor's courses, starting with his first offered in 1915, were applied and biological in nature. In illustrating each statistical technique or method use was made of real data obtained primarily from agricultural research investigations involving Snedecor as the statistical consultant. In presenting methods and techniques, in his agriculturally oriented statistical courses, Snedecor made every effort to become acquainted with the early and current developments in biological and agricultural statistics elsewhere. As noted by Lush (1972), "By 1925 Pearl's Biometry for Medical Students and Fisher's Statistical