Background
He was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1899 and died in 1979.
He was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1899 and died in 1979.
He was the first secretary of the International Biometric Society. Bachelor of Arts in Entomology from Ohio State University, 1921 Master of Arts from Columbia University, 1922 Doctor of Philosophy 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).
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.
