Edwin Bidwell Wilson


Edwin Bidwell Wilson was an American mathematician and polymath. He was the sole protégé of Yale's physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs and was mentor to MIT economist Paul Samuelson.

Life

Wilson received his AB from Harvard College in 1899 and his PhD from Yale University in 1901, working under Gibbs.
Wilson compiled the textbook Vector Analysis, based on Gibbs' lectures, as Gibbs was at the time busy preparing his book on thermodynamics.
Wilson gave a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1904 in Heidelberg and in 1924 in Toronto.
In 1924 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
In he introduced the Wilson score interval, a binomial proportion confidence interval, and also derived the "plus four rule", which uses a pseudocount of two for estimating the probability of a Bernoulli variable with a confidence interval of two standard deviations in each direction.

Works

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