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Norman Nie (1943 - 2015)
[New page 4 April 2015, last updated 5 April 2015]
Norman Nie, one of the principal creators of SPSS, died on 2nd April 2015 at his home in Sun Valley Idaho. Norman’s contribution to survey research and to quantitative methods in the social sciences was, and remains, invaluable. When SPSS was first installed at Edinburgh in 1970, it was called more times than the Fortran compiler. The manual sold in thousands, as students and researchers in sociology and related areas discovered they could by-pass programmers (who claimed it was inefficient) and statisticians (who claimed it was prone to errors). Been a few changes since then and SPSS is still the best. Thanks Norman. We owe you and your colleagues a great debt.
There's a biographical entry on Wikipedia, but as of 5 April 2015, no official obituaries.
Oral History of Norman Nie is a transcript of a 1986 interview with Luanne Johnson, Computer History Museum.
Tributes are flowing in: text below is in dark blue to celebrate the first (1970) edition of::
Nie, Hull and Jenkins,
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
ViAnn Beadle writes:
Norman Nie, one of the principal creators of SPSS died today. I have known Norman since 1969 when I was a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Chicago. Norman gave me my first real job in 1972 and my life would not be what it is without his mentorship, encouragement, and support.
Norman was a graduate student at Stanford University in the ‘60s who had a big problem to solve: how to analyze thousands of political surveys conducted among residents of 7 nations with nominally Democratic governments. In those days, the tool of choice was an IBM counter-sorter which was used to tabulate punch cards. Norman along with Tex Hull and Dale Bent (also at Stanford) developed a program to run on an IBM 360 to do all the drudge work and called it the Statistical Program for the Social Sciences. It was later renamed SPSS. Norman was the first and most influential user of SPSS. Norman and Tex both took jobs at the University of Chicago, Norman in the Political Science Department and Tex at the Computation Center. Even before they came to Chicago, SPSS was being adopted by graduate schools and governmental agencies. I was hired to provide technical support to the rapidly expanding user base for SPSS and retired in 2007.
Norman was first and foremost, a talented and respected Political Scientist and probably more proud of his contributions to Political Science than SPSS.
There would be no SPSS without Norman and all former and current SPSSers who knew him, miss him today
From: David Muxworthy
(who, with the late Marjorie Barritt, installed the very first SPSS in the UK at Edinburgh in 1970) ::
I had quite a lot of dealings with him in the 1970s but have not met him since. Apart from being a multi-award winning sociologist he was the inspiration behind SPSS and was ahead of his time in developing statistical computing. After the SPSS company sold out to IBM he moved to Stanford and I understand tended to use R rather than SPSS.
He died on Thursday 2 April at his home in Sun Valley Idaho. He had suffered from lung cancer which spread to his brain. He underwent experimental treatment in NYC, where he was still discussing his latest project
On my page Old Dog, Old Tricks see also, David's (and Tony Coxon's) contributions to
How SPSS came to the UK and the accompanying slide-show Survey processing before SPSS
Norman Nie, one of the principal creators of SPSS, died on 2nd April 2015 at his home in Sun Valley Idaho. Norman’s contribution to survey research and to quantitative methods in the social sciences was, and remains, invaluable. When SPSS was first installed at Edinburgh in 1970, it was called more times than the Fortran compiler. The manual sold in thousands, as students and researchers in sociology and related areas discovered they could by-pass programmers (who claimed it was inefficient) and statisticians (who claimed it was prone to errors). Been a few changes since then and SPSS is still the best. Thanks Norman. We owe you and your colleagues a great debt.
There's a biographical entry on Wikipedia, but as of 5 April 2015, no official obituaries.
Oral History of Norman Nie is a transcript of a 1986 interview with Luanne Johnson, Computer History Museum.
Tributes are flowing in: text below is in dark blue to celebrate the first (1970) edition of::
Nie, Hull and Jenkins,
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
ViAnn Beadle writes:
Norman Nie, one of the principal creators of SPSS died today. I have known Norman since 1969 when I was a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Chicago. Norman gave me my first real job in 1972 and my life would not be what it is without his mentorship, encouragement, and support.
Norman was a graduate student at Stanford University in the ‘60s who had a big problem to solve: how to analyze thousands of political surveys conducted among residents of 7 nations with nominally Democratic governments. In those days, the tool of choice was an IBM counter-sorter which was used to tabulate punch cards. Norman along with Tex Hull and Dale Bent (also at Stanford) developed a program to run on an IBM 360 to do all the drudge work and called it the Statistical Program for the Social Sciences. It was later renamed SPSS. Norman was the first and most influential user of SPSS. Norman and Tex both took jobs at the University of Chicago, Norman in the Political Science Department and Tex at the Computation Center. Even before they came to Chicago, SPSS was being adopted by graduate schools and governmental agencies. I was hired to provide technical support to the rapidly expanding user base for SPSS and retired in 2007.
Norman was first and foremost, a talented and respected Political Scientist and probably more proud of his contributions to Political Science than SPSS.
There would be no SPSS without Norman and all former and current SPSSers who knew him, miss him today
From: David Muxworthy
(who, with the late Marjorie Barritt, installed the very first SPSS in the UK at Edinburgh in 1970) ::
I had quite a lot of dealings with him in the 1970s but have not met him since. Apart from being a multi-award winning sociologist he was the inspiration behind SPSS and was ahead of his time in developing statistical computing. After the SPSS company sold out to IBM he moved to Stanford and I understand tended to use R rather than SPSS.
He died on Thursday 2 April at his home in Sun Valley Idaho. He had suffered from lung cancer which spread to his brain. He underwent experimental treatment in NYC, where he was still discussing his latest project
On my page Old Dog, Old Tricks see also, David's (and Tony Coxon's) contributions to
How SPSS came to the UK and the accompanying slide-show Survey processing before SPSS