Important Figures in Statistical History
Below is a partial list of people that have - either directly or indirectly - impacted
Probability / Statistics in a significant way.
Statistics
Bayes, Thomas a pioneer of subjective probability Cochran, William student of Wishart, helped develop experimental design techniques Cox, Gertrude also worked in experimental design
Cram�r, Harald worked with stationary stochastic processes, famous lower bound Edgeworth, Francis developed expansions for normal approximation Finetti, Bruno de staunch proponent of subjective interpretation of probability, famous representation theorem Fisher, Sir Ronald the father of modern Statistics Galton, Francis introduced correlation, coined "regression to mediocrity" Gosset, William published under the name "Student", developed small sample theory
Jeffreys, Sir Harold worked in Bayesian statistics, had famous rule for reference priors Kendall, Maurice huge figure in advanced statistical methods Legendre, Adrien-Marie early proponent of least-squares method Lukacs, Eugene leading authority on characteristic functions, used to teach at BGSU Neyman, Jerzy foundations of hypothesis tests and decision theory Pearson, Egon foundations of hypothesis tests and decision theory, son of Karl Pearson, Karl another father of modern Statistics, goodness-of-fit test, systems of distributions Quetelet, Adolphe pioneer of Statistics in the social sciences, invented "average man" Smirnov, Vladimir famous goodness-of-fit test with Kolmogorov Shewhart, Walter worked in quality control, famous control charts Slutsky, Evgeny introduced stochastic concepts of limits, derivatives and integrals Tukey, John founder of exploratory data analysis, among other accomplishments Wilks, Samuel worked in multivariate statistics, helped found Institute of Mathematical Statistics Wishart, John assistant of Fisher and Pearson, famous distribution for sample correlation matrix Yule, George colleague of Pearson, won the Guy Medal in Gold from R.S.S.
Probability
Doob, Joseph did early work with stochastic processes
Feller, William contributions to the Brownian motion and diffusion processes Fermat, Pierre de foundations of probability Gnedenko, Boris famous student of Kolmogorov and Khinchin Khinchin, Aleksandr foundations for the theory of stationary random processes, friend of Kolmogorov
Kolmogorov, Andrei solved Hilbert's sixth problem, proposed measure-theoretic interpretation of probability L�vy, Paul contributions in probability, functional analysis, and partial differential equations Markov, Andrei student of Chebyshev, studied number theory, analysis, continued fractions, limits of integrals Pascal, Blaise invented first digital calculator, laid foundations of probability R�nyi, Alfr�d said "a mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems" Shannon, Claude information theorist from Bell Labs, studied entropy von Mises, Richard proposed frequentist interpretation of probability, on which Kolmogorov's theory was based Wiener, Norbert helped with Brownian motion, friend of L�vy
Mathematics
Bernoulli, Jacob advanced algebra, calculus, mechanics, the theory of series, and the theory of probability Chebyshev, Pafnuty advisor of Markov, famous inequality Gauss, Carl Friedrich contributions too numerous to catalogue Laplace, Pierre-Simon one of first subjective probabilists, contributions too numerous to catalogue Poisson, Sim�on proved a weak law of large numbers, famous distribution in arrival processes
Please note: The above classification system is to a large extent arbitrary. Clearly, most of the above figures made significant contributions to all of Statistics, Probability, and Mathematics, as well as many other scientific fields. Any attempt to rigorously categorize their accomplishments is doomed to failure.