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| | The University of Chicago Magazine: December 1999, Research |
 | | He eventually found himself in the vault of the Royal Mint in London, examining materials from an ancient ceremony called the Trial of the Pyx, in which sample coins placed in the pyx at the end of several production cycles are taken out, counted, weighed, and assayed. |
 | | "Here I was being shown their most sacred treasures from a ceremony that has been going on for 800 years," he recalls, noting that the trial provides a rare example of a long-running quality-control program in which modern statistical concepts such as sampling have been used since the Middle Ages. |
 | | Stigler says he is now "trying to come to grips with the tremendous and exciting growth in statistics through the 20th century." He's interested in the relationship between statistical methods and the questions they are designed to answer in economics, genetics, and the social and physical sciences. |
| magazine.uchicago.edu /9912/research/stigler.html (1149 words) |
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