Frederick Mosteller, 89, preeminent statistician and founding
chairman of Harvard University's statistics department who
popularized the application of statistical data to fields from
politics to sports; in Falls Church Va. has died.
Mosteller first showed his knack for the laws of probability as a
teenager, while working on a road crew that played poker during rain delays.
1n1952, after mulling over the St. Louis Cardinals' 1946 Wor1d Series
win over the
Boston Redsox, he published the first known academic paper on
baseball statistics.
A stronger team on paper would often lose to a weaker team, he
proved, simply because of chance. Other problems he tackled: in
warfare, how strings of bombs would fall; why pollsters erred in
calling the 1948 election for Dewey over Truman; and the authorship
of the Federalist Papers, by analyzing word frequency. A droll
defender of his field he once wrote, "It is easy to lie with
statistics, but easier to lie without them.''