Bradley Efron

Bradley Efron is an American statistician and professor of statistics and biostatistics at Stanford University, best known for proposing the bootstrap resampling method in a 1979 paper. The bootstrap estimates the sampling distribution of a statistic by repeatedly resampling, with replacement, from the observed data itself, replacing many traditional algebraic derivations of standard errors and confidence intervals with data-based computer simulation, and it became one of the first widely adopted computer-intensive statistical methods as computing power grew more available. Efron's work spans theoretical and applied statistics, including empirical Bayes analysis, applications of differential geometry to statistical theory, survival data analysis, and the statistical analysis of large-scale gene expression data from microarrays. He served as president of the American Statistical Association in 2004 and president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1987 to 1988, and he founded the journal Annals of Applied Statistics. Efron received the National Medal of Science in 2005, the highest scientific honor given by the United States government, along with the Guy Medal in Gold and the International Prize in Statistics.