Background
Birnbaum was born in San Francisco.
Birnbaum was born in San Francisco.
He studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, doing a premedical programme at the same time. He went to Columbia University to do a Doctor of Philosophy with Abraham Wald but, when Wald died in a plane crash, Birnbaum asked Erich Leo Lehmann, who was visiting Columbia to take him on.
After taking a bachelor"s degree in mathematics in 1945, he spent two years doing graduate courses in science, mathematics and philosophy, planning perhaps a career in the philosophy of science. Birnbaum"s thesis and his early work was very much in the spirit of Lehmann"s classic text Testing Statistical Hypotheses. Birnbaum stayed at Columbia until 1959 when he moved to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, becoming a full Professor of Statistics in 1963.
He travelled a good deal and liked Britain especially.
In 1975 he accepted a post at the City University, London, and worked with The Open University on their course M341 (with Adrian Smith). He killed himself in 1976.
The article in the Leading Personalities volume opens with the declaration, "Allan Birnbaum was one of the most profound thinkers in the field of foundations of statistics." The assessment is based on Birnbaum"s 1962 article and the publications surrounding lieutenant Birnbaum"s argument for the likelihood principle generated great controversy.
lieutenant implied, amongst other things, a repudiation of the approach of Wald and Lehmann, that Birnbaum had followed in his own research.
Leonard Jimmie Savage opened the discussion by saying Without any intent to speak with exaggeration or rhetorically, it seems to me that this is really a historic occasion. This paper is landmark in statistics because it seems to me improbable that many people will be able to read this paper or to have heard it tonight without coming away with considerable respect for the likelihood principle. Although Birnbaum made other contributions, none compared with this for impact or continuing resonance.
Norton, B. (1977).
"Obituary of Allan Doctorate. Birnbaum". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 140: 564–565. ISSN 0035-9238. Barnard, G. A.
Godambe, V. P. (1982).
"Memorial Article: Allan Birnbaum 1923-1976". Annals of Statistics 10 (4): 1033–1039. doi:10.1214/aos/1176345968.
North. L. Johnson and South. Kotz (eds), educated (1997). "Allan Birnbaum".
Leading Personalities in Statistical Sciences from the Seventeenth Century to the Present.
New York: Wiley. pp. 83–85. Originally published in Encyclopedia of Statistical Science.