Bradley Efron

Efron is especially known for proposing the bootstrap resampling technique, which has had a major impact in the field of statistics and virtually every area of statistical application. The bootstrap was one of the first computer-intensive statistical techniques, replacing traditional algebraic derivations with data-based computer simulations.

Life and career

Efron was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in May 1938, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Esther and Miles Efron. He attended the California Institute of Technology, graduating in mathematics in 1960. By his own admission he "had no talent for modern abstract math". His interest in statistics emerged after reading a Harald Cramér book cover to cover. Soon later, he arrived at Stanford in fall of 1960, earning his Ph.D., under the direction of Rupert Miller and Herbert Solomon, in the Department of Statistics. While at Stanford, he was suspended for six months for his involvement with the Stanford Chaparral's parody of Playboy magazine.

He is currently a professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at Stanford. At Stanford he has been the Chair of the Department of Statistics, Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, Chairman of the University Advisory Board, Chair of the Faculty Senate, and co-director of the undergraduate-level Mathematical & Computational Science Program.

Efron holds the Max H. Stein endowed chair as Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.

He has made many important contributions to many areas of statistics. Efron's work has spanned both theoretical and applied topics, including empirical Bayes analysis (with Carl Morris), applications of differential geometry to statistical inference, the analysis of survival data, and inference for microarray gene expression data. He is the author of a classic monograph, The Jackknife, the Bootstrap and Other Resampling Plans (1982) and has also co-authored (with Robert Tibshirani) the text An Introduction to the Bootstrap (1994).

He created a set of intransitive dice called Efron's dice.