1922 Greenwood’s standard error for life-tables

Greenwood’s widely used standard error for life-tables is to be found in an appendix to his 1926 Report on the Natural Duration of Cancer rather than in his earlier Royal Statistical Society paper on the value of life-tables in statistical research. The 1926 Report and its formula were widely-read by clinicians, not least because the report included Greenwood’s ground-breaking work on the curability of breast cancer.

References

1. Greenwood M. Value of life-tables in statistical research. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 1922; 85: 537-560.
2. 1926 Greenwood M. A report on the natural duration of cancer. {Reports on Public Health and Medical Subjects, No 33, 1926}

 

1928 Ethel Newbold: 1st female Silver Guy Medallist of the Royal Statistical Society

In 1928, Ethel May Newbold (1882-1933) became the first female to be awarded the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society for her work on the statistics of repeated events. Newbold’s statistical career at the Medical Research Council spanned little more than 8 years but her Director, Greenwood, averred that: “few investigators have done so much in so short a time”.

In 2009, the second female to be awarded the Guy Medal in Silver was Sylvia Richardson who, in 2012, was appointed the first female Director of MRC Biostatistics Unit.

In 2013, in recognition of the historically important role of women in statistics, the Bernoulli Council approved the “Ethel Newbold Prize in Statistics” to be awarded every two years from 2015, for a body of work that represents excellence in research in statistics.

References

1. Newbold EM. Practical applications of the statistics of repeated events, particularly to industrial accidents. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 1927; 90: 487-XXX.
2. Greenwood M. Ethel May Newbold (Obituary). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 1933; 96: 354-357. See http://www.jstor.org/stable/2341811.