Paul Meier (statistician)

Paul Meier
Born(1924-07-24)July 24, 1924
DiedAugust 7, 2011(2011-08-07) (aged 87)
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