The Berkeley Statistics Department I: Establishment and First Generation

In 1938, Griffith Evans, chair of the Berkeley mathematics department, brought Jerzy Neyman to Berkeley to develop a statistics program. He presumably thought of two or three undergraduate courses, and a similar number of graduate courses taught by Neyman and perhaps one or two younger people. That things turned out very differently was due to two factors: Neyman’s ambition and energy, and the explosive development of the field of statistics in the wake of World War II.