Walter Andrew Shewhart (March 18, 1891 - March 11, 1967) was a physicist, engineer and statistician, sometimes known as the father of statistical quality control. March 18 is the 77th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (78th in leap years). ... 1891 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... 11 March is the 70th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (71st in Leap year). ... 1967 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A physicist is a scientist trained in physics. ... Look up Engineer on Wiktionary, the free dictionary An engineer is someone who practices the profession of engineering – a person who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical problems using technology. ... For Wikipedia statistics, see m:Statistics Statistics is the science and practice of developing human knowledge through the use of empirical data expressed in quantitative form. ...

W. Edwards Deming said of him: William Edwards Deming, Ph. ...

As a statistician, he was, like so many of the rest of us, self-taught, on a good background of physics and mathematics.

Early life and education

Born New Canton, Illinois to Anton and Esta Barney Shewhart, he attended the University of Illinois before being awarded his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1917. New Canton is a town located in Pike County, Illinois. ... The University of Illinois is the set of three public universities in Illinois. ... Since antiquity, people have tried to understand the behavior of matter: why unsupported objects drop to the ground, why different materials have different properties, and so forth. ... University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, University of California, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a public coeducational university situated in Berkeley, California, USA to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate. ... 1917 was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar (see link for calendar) or a common year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar. ...

Work on industrial quality

Following a brief spell as an academic, in 1918 Shewhart joined the Western Electric Company, a manufacturer of telephony hardware for the Bell Telephone Company. Bell Telephone’s engineers had been working to improve the reliability of their transmission systems. Because amplifiers and other equipment had to be buried underground, there was a business need to reduce the frequency of failures and repairs. Bell Telephone had already realised the importance of reducing variation in a manufacturing process. Moreover, they had realised that continual process-adjustment in reaction to non-conformance actually increased variation and degraded quality. In 1924, Shewhart framed the problem in terms of assignable-cause and chance-cause variation and introduced the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two. Shewhart stressed that bringing a production process into a state of statistical control, where there is only chance-cause variation, and keeping it in control, is necessary to predict future output and to manage a process economically. Shewhart worked to advance the thinking at Bell Telephone Laboratories from their foundation in 1925 until his retirement in 1956, publishing a series of papers in the Bell System Technical Journal. 1918 was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar (see link for calendar) or a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar. ... Western Electric (sometimes abbreviated WECo) was a US electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1984 . ... 1924 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Special cause Common- and special-causes are the two distinct origins of variation, in a process that features in the statistical thinking and methods of Walter A. Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming. ... Special cause Common- and special-causes are the two distinct origins of variation, in a process that features in the statistical thinking and methods of Walter A. Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming. ... The control chart, also known as the Shewhart chart or process-behaviour chart is a statistical tool intended to assess the nature of variation in a process and to facilitate forecasting and management. ... Statistical Process Control, or SPC is a method for achieving quality control in manufacturing processes. ... Special cause Common- and special-causes are the two distinct origins of variation, in a process that features in the statistical thinking and methods of Walter A. Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming. ... Bell Telephone Laboratories or Bell Labs was originally the research and development arm of the United States Bell System, and was the premier corporate facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies from telephone switches to specialized coverings for telephone cables, to the transistor. ... 1925 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Bell System Technical Journal was the in-house journal of Bell Laboratories. ...

His work was summarised in his book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (1931). 1931 is a common year starting on Thursday. ...

Shewhart’s charts were adopted by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) in 1933 and advocated to improve production during World War II in American War Standards Z1.1-1941, Z1.2-1941 and Z1.3-1942. ASTM International is an international voluntary standards organization that develops and produces technical standards for materials, products, systems and services. ... 1933 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: immense human suffering, fierce indoctrinations, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons like the atom bomb World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a mid-20th-century conflict that engulfed much of the globe...

Later work

From the late 1930s onwards, Shewhart's interests expanded out from industrial quality to wider concerns in science and statistical inference. The title of his second book Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (1939) asks the audacious question: What can statistical practice, and science in general, learn from the experience of industrial quality control? // Events and trends The 1930s were spent struggling for a solution to the global depression. ... // What is science? There are different theories of what science is. ... The topics below are usually included in the area of interpreting statistical data. ... 1939 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... One data collection technique is simple random sampling. ... // What is science? There are different theories of what science is. ...

Shewhart's approach to statistics was radically different from that of many of his contemporaries. He possessed a strong operationalist outlook, largely absorbed from the writings of pragmatist philosopher C. I. Lewis, and this influenced his statistical practice. In particular, he had read Lewis's Mind and the World Order many times. Though he lectured in England in 1932 under the sponsorship of Karl Pearson (another committed operationalist) his ideas attracted little enthusiasm within the English statistical tradition. The British Standards nominally based on his work, in fact, diverge on serious philosophical and methodological issues from his practice. Statistics is a type of data analysis which practice includes the planning, summarizing, and interpreting of observations of a system possibly followed by predicting or forecasting of future events based on a mathematical model of the system being observed. ... Pragmatism is a school of philosophy which originated in the United States in the late 1800s. ... Clarence Irving Lewis (April 12, 1883 _ February 3, 1964) was a pragmatist philosopher. ... One data collection technique is simple random sampling. ... Clarence Irving Lewis (April 12, 1883 _ February 3, 1964) was a pragmatist philosopher. ... Royal motto: Dieu et mon droit (French: God and my right) Englands location within the UK Official language English de facto Capital London de facto Largest city London Area - Total Ranked 1st UK 130,395 km² Population - Total (mid-2004) - Density Ranked 1st UK 50. ... 1932 is a leap year starting on a Friday. ... Karl Pearson (March 27, 1857 – April 27, 1936) was a major contributor to the early development of statistics as a serious scientific discipline in its own right. ... British Standards is the new name of the British Standards Institute and is part of BSI Group which also includes a testing organisation. ...

His more conventional work led him to formulate the statistical idea of tolerance intervals and to propose his data presentation rules, which are listed below: Also know as Tolerance limits. ...

1. Data has no meaning apart from its context.
2. Some data contains "noise" some data contains "signal." To be able to extract the information from the any data set one must separate the noise from the signal.

Shewhart visited India three times under the sponsorship of P. C. Mahalanobis. One visit in the 1950s resulted in a collaboration with Genichi Taguchi (& R. A. Fisher? - does anyone have any info on Shewhart in India?). He also visited Japan. (Does anyone know anything about Shewhart in Japan?) Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (born June 29, 1893, died June 28, 1972) was an Indian scientist and applied statistician. ... Genichi Taguchi (田口 玄一) (born January 1, 1924 in Takamachi, Japan) is an engineer and statistician. ... Sir Ronald Fisher Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962) was an evolutionary biologist, geneticist and statistician. ...

He died at Troy Hills, New Jersey in 1967. 1967 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Influence

In 1938 his work came to the attention of physicists W. Edwards Deming and Raymond T. Birge. The two had been deeply intrigued by the issue of measurement error in science and had published a landmark paper in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1934. On reading of Shewhart's insights, they wrote to the journal to wholly recast their approach in the terms that Shewhart advocated. 1938 was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... A physicist is a scientist trained in physics. ... William Edwards Deming, Ph. ... Raymond Thayer Birge (March 13, 1887 - March 22, 1980) was a physicist. ... 1934 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ...

The encounter began a long collaboration between Shewhart and Deming that involved work on productivity during World War II and Deming's championing of Shewhart's ideas in Japan from 1950 onwards. Deming developed some of Shewhart's methodological proposals around scientific inference and named his synthesis the Shewhart cycle. William Edwards Deming, Ph. ... World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: immense human suffering, fierce indoctrinations, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons like the atom bomb World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a mid-20th-century conflict that engulfed much of the globe... William Edwards Deming, Ph. ... 1950 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... William Edwards Deming, Ph. ... Named for Walter Shewhart who discussed the concept in his 1939 book, Statistical Method From the Viewpoint of Quality Control, it is the continuous improvement cycle of Plan, Do, Check, Act. ...

During the 1990s, Shewhart's genius was rediscovered by a third generation of industrial managers as the Six Sigma approach. // Events and trends The 1990s are generally classified as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but otherwise retaining the same mindset. ... Six Sigma is a quality management program to achieve six sigma levels of quality. ...

Achievements and honours

In his obituary for the American Statistical Association, Deming wrote of Shewhart: The American Statistical Association (ASA) is a scientific and educational society in the United States with the stated mission to promote excellence in the application of statistical science across the wealth of human endeavor. ... William Edwards Deming, Ph. ...

As a man, he was gentle, genteel, never ruffled, never off his dignity. He knew disappointment and frustration, through failure of many writers in mathematical statistics to understand his point of view.

He was founding editor of the Wiley Series in Mathematical Statistics, a role that he maintained for twenty years, always championing freedom of speech and confident to publish views at variance with his own. A public demonstration Freedom of speech is often regarded as an integral concept in modern liberal democracies, where it is understood to outlaw censorship. ...

His honours included:

• Founding member, fellow and president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics;
• Founding member, first honorary member and first Shewhart Medalist of the American Society for Quality Control;
• Fellow and president of the American Statistical Association;
• Fellow of the International Statistical Institute;
• Honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society;
• Holley medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers;
• Honorary Doctor of Science, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta.

The Shewhart Medal, named in honour of Walter A. Shewhart, is awarded annually by the American Society for Quality for . ... American Society for Quality (ASQ), formerly known as American Society for Quality Control (ASQC), is a non-profit professional society comprised of almost 100,000 members who work in various aspects of the quality field (e. ... The American Statistical Association (ASA) is a scientific and educational society in the United States with the stated mission to promote excellence in the application of statistical science across the wealth of human endeavor. ... The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK. Founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London, it has 7200 members in the UK and the rest of the world, around 1500 of whom are professionally qualified. ... The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is a professional body, specifically an engineering society, focused on mechanical engineering. ... The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is an institution devoted to the research, teaching and application of statistics, natural sciences and social sciences. ... This article is on Calcutta/Kolkata, the city. ...

Quotes

Both pure and applied science have gradually pushed further and further the requirements for accuracy and precision. However, applied science, particularly in the mass production of interchangeable parts, is even more exacting than pure science in certain matters of accuracy and precision.

Publications

• Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (1931) ISBN 73890760
• Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (1939) ISBN 0486652327

1931 is a common year starting on Thursday. ... 1939 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ...

Bibliography

• Deming, W. Edwards (1967)Walter A. Shewhart, 1891-1967, American Statistician, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Apr., 1967), pp. 39-40.

• Bayart, D. (2001) Walter Andrew Shewhart, Statisticians of the Centuries (ed. C. C. Heyde and E. Seneta) pp. 398-401. New York: Springer.

• Fagen, M D (ed.) (1975) A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: The Early Years (1875-1925)
• Fagen, M D (ed.) (1978) A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: National Service in War and Peace (1925-1975) ISBN 0932764002

External links

• ASQ Shewhart page