Sir Arthur Lyon Bowley, FBA (6 November 1869 – 21 January 1957) was an English statistician and economist[1][2] who worked on economic statistics and pioneered the use of sampling techniques in social surveys.

Arthur was educated at Christ's Hospital, and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics.

[7] Bowley's students included Ronald George,[8] Lewis Connor[9] and Winifred Mackenzie, first recipient of the Frances Wood memorial prize.

[11] Bowley produced a stream of studies of British economic statistics, beginning in the 1890s with work on trade and on wages and income.

His 1900 publication Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century was created using the unpaid assistance of Edith Marvin when she was a researcher at the London School of Economics.

Even in the 1930s his research could take a new direction, as when he collaborated with his junior colleague R. G. D. Allen on an econometric study of family expenditure.

[13] He retired in 1936 but served as acting Director of the Oxford University Institute of Statistics during the Second World War.

In statistical theory Bowley was not an innovator but drew on the writings of Karl Pearson, Udny Yule and F. Y. Edgeworth.

In the 1930s, Bowley informed Fisher that "Professor Edgeworth had written a great deal on a kindred subject" and slapping Neyman down with "I am not at all sure that the 'confidence' [in confidence interval] is not a 'confidence trick.

'"[15] Bowley's teaching presaged several of the EDA ideas later popularised by John Tukey, including stemplots, decile boxplots, the seven-figure summary and trimean.

The following excerpt illustrates his approach This was written just before Bowley got involved in the controversy between Fisher and Pearson on chi-squared.