Bradley Efron  Robert J. Tibshirani When I first encountered “Bootstrap” algorithm and looked at its application , I was literally blown away. Here was a methodology that took the traditional statistics head-on. Armed with a computer and a basic algorithm for bootstrap, you can pretty much do any sort of analysis that you can find in traditional statistical world. Guess what, you hardly need to remember any complicated formulae. Somehow people who are used to traditional way of doing statistics do not like bootstrapping for various reasons.

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Statistics stands on two pillars, estimation and inference. Pretty much anything you work on stats, you end up either estimating something or inferring something. If you take a random sample of people who have taken a stats101 course at some point in their lives and ask them what was the course all about , a most likely answer would be, “It was something to do with p-values”. Statistics at it core is about comparing a set of numbers with each other , with theoretical models and with past experience.

Via What Are the Odds That Stats Would Be This Popular? “Most of my life I went to parties and heard a little groan when people heard what I did,” says Robert Tibshirani, a statistics professor at Stanford University. “Now they’re all excited to meet me.” It’s not because of a new after-shave. Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech’s hottest calling.

Joshua Foer, the author of the book, “Moonwalking with Einstein”, speaks at TED. http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf