In late 1801 the orbit of the newly discovered asteroid Ceres carried it behind the sun, and astronomers worried they had lost it forever. A young mathematical prodigy named Carl Friedrich Gauss developed a new statistical technique to find it. Called “least squares regression,” that technique is now a fundamental method of statistical analysis. For about 200 years after that, however, astronomers and statisticians had little to do with one another. But in the last decade or so, astronomy and statistics have finally begun to formalize a promising relationship. Together they are developing the new discipline of astrostatistics. Jogesh Babu, a Pennsylvania State professor and the director of the Penn State Center for Astrostatistics, remembers when the new age of astrostatistics dawned for him. Twenty-five years ago, when Babu’s focus was statistical theory, astronomy professor Eric Feigelson asked to meet with him to talk about a problem. At the end of the conversation, Babu says, “we realized we both speak English but we didn’t understand a word the other said.” symmetrymagazine.org/article/november-2014/the-rise-of-astrostatistics?email_issue=617
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:27:37 +0000
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