Paul Meier (statistician)

Paul Meier
Born(1924-07-24)July 24, 1924
Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
DiedAugust 7, 2011(2011-08-07) (aged 87)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Alma materOberlin College
Princeton
Known forStatistics, experimental design, biostatistics
Scientific career
FieldsStatistician
InstitutionsPrinceton
Johns Hopkins
Univ. Chicago
Lehigh University
Columbia
Doctoral advisorJohn Tukey

Paul Meier (July 24, 1924 – August 7, 2011)[1] was a statistician who promoted the use of randomized trials in medicine.[2][3]

Meier is known for introducing, with Edward L. Kaplan, the Kaplan–Meier estimator,[4][5] a method for measuring how many patients survive a medical treatment from one duration to another, taking into account that the sampled population changes over time.[6]

Meier's 1957 evaluation of polio vaccine practices published in Science has been described as influential, and the Kaplan–Meier method is thought to have indirectly extended tens of thousands of lives.[2]

  1. ^ Hevesi, Dennis (August 12, 2011), "Paul Meier, Statistician Who Revolutionized Medical Trials, Dies at 87", The New York Times
  2. ^ a b David Brown (August 10, 2011). "Paul Meier, biostatistician and co-inventor of a famous graph, dies at 87". Washington Post.
  3. ^ "Paul Meier, Obituary". The Daily Telegraph. October 2, 2011.
  4. ^ Kaplan, E. L.; Meier, P.: Nonparametric estimation from incomplete observations. J. Amer. Statist. Assn. 53:457–481, 1958. JSTOR 2281868
  5. ^ Kaplan, E.L. in a retrospective on the seminal paper in "This week's citation classic". Current Contents 24, 14 (1983).Available from UPenn as PDF.
  6. ^ Harry M Marks (2004), "A conversation with Paul Meier" (PDF), Clinical Trials, 1 (1): 131–138, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.575.5895, doi:10.1191/1740774504cn011xx, PMID 16281468, S2CID 71816703, archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-02-06, retrieved 2011-08-14