Neyman

In the beginning, writing about a man like Neyman, who was alive and still very active, I planned to limit myself to his recollections and records and to my personal observations of him during his eighty-fifth year. Watson Library at University College, the National Archives, and the Rockefeller Foundation Archives. Jerzy Neyman received the National Medal of Science "for laying the foundations of modern statistics and devising tests and procedures that have become essential parts of the knowledge of every statistician." Until his death in 1981 at the age of eighty-seven, he was vigorously involved in the concerns and controversies of the day, a teaching professor at the University of California, and the directory of the Berkeley Statistical Laboratory. Neyman was a scientist whose personality and activity were integral parts of his contribution to his science. His career is thus particulary well-suited for the nontechnical scientific life-story which Constance Reid has made her own in such well-received biographies of scientists Hilbert and Courant in Goettingen and New York. She was able to talk extensively with Neyman and to have access to his personal and professional letters and papers. Her book will appeal to the professional statistician as well as to the layman who would like to learn something of a subject which permeates almost every aspect of modern life.