The Professor and the Student, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962) and William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937): Careers of two giants in mathematical statistics

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher and William Sealy Gosset were responsible for laying the foundations of statistical inference. Tests that bear their names are used by students and researchers in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Similar and different in many respects, their lives and careers are the subject of this essay. They were not teacher and pupil; in fact the student was 14 years older than the professor. Their careers did not require them to interact with one another much but they were aware of one another's work. Although Sir Ronald is assigned the role of the professor, his success as a teacher was impaired by his inability to understand the limitations of his students. Meanwhile Gosset was forced to publish his work under the pseudonym 'Student' in order to make contributions to the field of mathematical statistics. Both men are undisputed giants in the field of statistics and we celebrate their achievements as much as we try to understand their struggles.

Was zählt der Preis? Dogmengeschichte und Wissensgeschichte der Ökonomie

What's in a Price? History of Economic Ideologies vs. History of Economic Ideas. This paper suggests applying the approach of a historical epistemology to the field of economics. We observe that an assumedly fundamental opposition between the market and the state dominates popular images of the history of economic ideas. Two conflicting ideologies are roughly assigned to the two opposing sides in the Cold War. To this historical narrative the paper opposes a different view. The argument is that when taking the technical practices of economic knowledge production in the twentieth century into view, similarities abound across ideological ruptures. The chief characteristic change in the recent history of economics was a radical turn towards quantification, measurement, and mathematical modelling. A historical epistemology of economics could show how deeply both, admirers of the state and of the market, share a history. The paper concludes that to-date critique of political economy should also take into consideration a critical perspective towards the unfolding of this measurement revolution in the social sciences.

CHRONOMICS AND GENETICS

The mapping of time structures, chronomes, constitutes an endeavor spawned by chronobiology: chronomics. This cartography in time shows signatures on the surface of the earth, cycles, also accumulating in life on the earth's surface. We append a glossary of these and other cycles, the names being coined in the light of approximate cycle length. These findings are transdisciplinary, in view of their broad representation and critical importance in the biosphere. Suggestions of mechanisms are derived from an analytical statistical documentation of characteristics with superposed epochs and superposed cycles and other "remove-and-replace" approaches. These approaches use the spontaneously changing presence or absence of an environmental, cyclic or other factor for the study of any corresponding changes in the biosphere. We illustrate the indispensability of the mapping of rhythm characteristics in broader structures, chronomes, along several or all available different time scales. We present results from a cooperative cartography of about 10, about 20, and about 50-year rhythms in the context of a broad endeavor concerned with the Biosphere and the Cosmos, the BIOCOS project. The participants in this project are our co-authors worldwide, beyond Brno and Minneapolis; the studies of human blood pressure and heart rate around the clock and along the week may provide the evidence for those influences that Mendel sought in meteorology and climatology.