Edward Hugh Simpson is a British statistician best known for describing Simpson's paradox along with Udny Yule.
Edward Simpson (born 1922) was introduced to the thinking of mathematical statistics as a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park (1942-45). He wrote the paper 'The Interpretation of Interaction in Contingency Tables' while a postgraduate student at Cambridge in 1946 with Maurice Bartlett as his tutor; and published it in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in 1951 at Bartlett's request because Bartlett wanted to refer to it.
The Paradox is widely used in mathematical statistics teaching to illustrate the care statisticians need to take when interpreting data. It figured in a 2009 episode of the popular U.S. TV crime-solving series 'Numb3rs'.
Simpson entered the civil service administrative class in the Ministry of Education in 1947 and subsequently worked also in the Treasury, the Commonwealth Education Liaison Unit, as Private Secretary to Lord Hailsham as Lord President of the Council and Lord Privy Seal, and in the Civil Service Department. He was a Commonwealth Fund (Harkness) Fellow in the USA (1956-57). At one point a useful observation of his on the aggregate behaviour of teachers' pay was labelled "Simpson's Drift". He retired from the Department of Education and Science as a Deputy Secretary and C.B. in 1982 and now lives in Oxfordshire.
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