Chester Ittner Bliss

For the American politician, see Chester Bliss Bowles.

Chester Ittner Bliss was primarily a biologist, who is best known for his contributions to statistics. He was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1899 and died in 1979. He was the first secretary of the International Biometric Society.

Academic qualifications

• Bachelor of Arts in Entomology from Ohio State University, 1921
• Master of Arts from Columbia University, 1922
• PhD from Columbia University, 1926

Remarkably, his statistical knowledge was largely self-taught and developed according to the problems he wanted to solve (Cochran & Finney 1979).

Major contributions

Arguably his most important contribution was the development, with Ronald Fisher, of an iterative approach to finding maximum likelihood estimates in the probit method of bioassay. Additional contributions in biological assay were work on the analysis of time-mortality data and of slope-ratio assays (Cochran & Finney 1979).

Bliss introduced the word rankit, meaning an expected normal order statistic.

References

• C. I. Bliss (1935)The calculation of the dosage-mortality curve, Annals of Applied Biology 22, 134–167. (includes appendix by Fisher.)
• W. G. Cochran, D. J. Finney. 1979 Chester Ittner Bliss, 1899–1979, Biometrics; 35(4): 715–717. pdf
• D. J. Finney. 1980 Chester Ittner Bliss, 1899–1979, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 143(1): 92–93.
• T. R. Holford & C. White (2005) Bliss, Chester Ittner, Encyclopedia of Biostatistics.

External links

• University of Adelaide: Correspondence between C. I. Bliss and R. A. Fisher
• University of Adelaide: Fisher's appendix to Bliss (1935)