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 flowed in: text below is in BLUE to celebrate the first (1970) edition of:
Nie, Bent & Hull
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
(McGraw-Hill, 1970)
No photo available yet.
The original SPSS manual . . . has been described as 'Sociology's most influential book'.[2] I
Oral History of Norman Nie is a transcript of a 1986 interview with Luanne Johnson, Computer History Museum.
Tributes flowed in: text below is in BLUE to celebrate the first (1970) edition of:
Nie, Bent & Hull
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
(McGraw-Hill, 1970)
No photo available yet.
The original SPSS manual . . . has been described as 'Sociology's most influential book'.[2] I
Nie, Hull, Jenkins, Steinbrenner & Bent
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
(2nd edition, McGraw-Hill, 1975)