Roots of the Iowa State Statistical Center

              Roots of the Iowa State Statistical Center
T. A. Bancroft, Professor Emeritus
[Former Director of the Statistical Laboratory (est. 1933) and Head
of the Department of Statistics (est. 1947) from 1950 to 1972]
(1) Early Developments: Teaching, Consulting and Cooperative Research
1914-1941.
Courses, essentially statistical in nature, were offered by the
Department of Mathematics beginning in 1914 and by the Department of
Economics beginning in 1915. George W. Snedecor, who had joined
the faculty at Iowa State in 1913, undertook the responsibility for the
teaching of statistics in Mathematics. However, those interested in
taking or auditing these courses were primarily graduate students,
teachers, and research workers in substantive fields in Agriculture.
In particular, such staff and students in the plant and animal sciences
and genetics were discovering the importance of statistical methods
in their research investigations. As a consequence of these consider­ations,
and his own interests, Snedecor's courses, starting with his
first offered in 1915, were applied and biological in nature. In
illustrating each statistical technique or method use was made of real
data obtained primarily from agricultural research investigations
involving Snedecor as the statistical consultant.
In presenting methods and techniques, in his agriculturally
oriented statistical courses, Snedecor made every effort to become
acquainted with the early and current developments in biological and
agricultural statistics elsewhere. As noted by Lush (1972), "By
1925 Pearl's Biometry for Medical Students and Fisher's Statistical