Chester Ittner Bliss (February 1, 1899 – March 14, 1979) was primarily a biologist, who is best known for his contributions to statistics.
Remarkably, his statistical knowledge was largely self-taught and developed according to the problems he wanted to solve (Cochran & Finney 1979).
[1] The idea of the probit function was published by Bliss in a 1934 article in Science on how to treat data such as the percentage of a pest killed by a pesticide.
Arguably his most important contribution was the development, with Ronald Fisher, of an iterative approach to finding maximum likelihood estimates in the probit method of bioassay.
Bliss introduced the word rankit, meaning an expected normal order statistic.