Chester Ittner Bliss
- 1 min read
- 2 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Statistics, Science (journal) and Pesticide
Academic qualifications
- Bachelor of Arts in Entomology from Ohio State University, 1921
- Master of Arts from Columbia University, 1922
- PhD from Columbia University, 1926
Remarkably, his statistical knowledge was largely self-taught and developed according to the problems he wanted to solve (Cochran & Finney 1979). Nevertheless, in 1942 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Sign in to keep reading
One more chapter is free with a Lably account.
Major contributions
The idea of the probit function was published by Bliss in a 1934 article in Science on how to treat data such as the percentage of a pest killed by a pesticide. Bliss proposed transforming the percentage killed into a "probability unit" (or "probit").
Arguably his most important contribution was the development, with Ronald Fisher, of an iterative approach to finding maximum likelihood estimates in the probit method of bioassay. Additional contributions in biological assay were work on the analysis of time-mortality data and of slope-ratio assays (Cochran & Finney 1979).
Bliss introduced the word rankit, meaning an expected normal order statistic.