Analytics Insight: Cornell University
Cornell University was founded in 1865 in Ithaca, New York by Andrew D. White and Ezra Cornell, the latter famously stating “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” The founders could not have envisioned the full extent of modern data science, of course, but scientific research of all types has been at the heart of Cornell’s mission since its beginning. Statistics itself – the precursor or original discipline underlying data science – first came to prominence at Cornell after World War II, with the presence of two seminal figures in the field, Jack Kiefer and Jacob Wolfowitz, as faculty members. Since then, Cornell’s Department of Statistics and Data Science (as it is now called) has hosted and continues to be the home of many prominent researchers in theoretical and applied statistical methods.
