Some Aspects of the History of Biometric Method in the Twentieth Century with a Special Reference to Prof. Linder’s Work

Abstract

It is an honour and a great pleasure to take part in the tribute to Professor Linder on his 70th birthday. I have long been interested in the history of our subject. My first paper on this topic was published in 1935, and I returned to it again, to some extent, in my presidental address to the Royal Statistical Society. In between these two dates, some fifteen years ago, I gave a talk at Pittsburgh to a joint meeting of several American societies. It was entitled ‘Biometric Method, Past, Present and Future’. My object was to attempt a definition of biometric method, to show how it arose from developments, which go back as far as the sixteenth century; but that the main progress was made in the late nineteenth and in the present century. This subject is very pertinent to Professor Linder’s work, for he is the ‘Doyen’ of Swiss biometricians and applied statisticians.