Barbara Falkenbach Ryan

Barbara Falkenbach Ryan is an American mathematician, computer scientist, statistician and business executive. She is known for developing the Minitab statistical software package, and for being president and CEO of Minitab, Inc.

Education and early career

Ryan earned her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1968 at Cornell University, studying recursion theory under the supervision of Anil Nerode. Her dissertation was ω-Cohesive Sets.[1][2] Nerode writes that, although Ryan moved away from this subject "immediately after her degree", Nerode still found her thesis work to be original and worth publishing many years later, and was able to persuade Ryan to publish the work in a journal by threatening to hold back a letter of reference for her.[3]

Soon after completing their doctorates, Ryan and her then-husband, statistician and fellow Cornell graduate Thomas A. Ryan Jr. (1940–2017)[2][3][4] found positions at Pennsylvania State University. She joined the computer science department at Penn State, and published research on a more applied topic, I/O scheduling.[5]

Minitab

In 1972, Thomas Ryan and another Penn State statistics instructor, Brian L. Joiner, first began developing Minitab, with the consultation of Barbara Ryan. In 1974, Joiner left Penn State and Barbara Ryan joined Thomas Ryan as one of the Minitab developers.[6]

In 1983 the Ryans spun off their software into a company, Minitab, Inc.[7] In 1988, Barbara Ryan and her husband divorced, her husband left Minitab,[4] and Ryan became president and chief executive officer of the company.[8]

As originally formulated, Minitab was primarily used for engineering applications and statistical education. In the late 1990s, Ryan chose to focus Minitab more towards Six Sigma business process improvement. The software became the market leader in this area, and this change spurred significant growth for the company.[9]

Service and recognition

Ryan chaired the Statistical Computing Section of the American Statistical Association in 1984.[10] In 1990, the association named Ryan as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[11]

References
  1. Barbara Falkenbach Ryan at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. Cornell Mathematics Doctorates, 1960–1969, Cornell University Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2019-01-29
  3. Nerode, Anil (1999), Autobiography: My Life at Cornell, retrieved 2019-01-29
  4. "Thomas "Tom" A. Ryan, Jr.", Memorial Minutes, 2018 Yearbook, Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, retrieved 2019-01-29
  5. Coffman, E. G.; Klimko, L. A.; Ryan, Barbara (September 1972), "Analysis of scanning policies for reducing disk seek times", SIAM Journal on Computing, 1 (3): 269–279, doi:10.1137/0201018
  6. Ryan, Thomas A.; Joiner, Brian L.; Ryan, Barbara F. (August 15, 2006), "Minitab", Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences, Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1002/0471667196.ess1647.pub2
  7. Harkness, William; Hettmansperger, Thomas; Lin, Dennis; Rosenberger, James (2013), "Penn State University Department of Statistics", in Agresti, Alan; Meng, Xiao-Li (eds.), Strength in Numbers: The Rising of Academic Statistics Departments in the U. S., New York: Springer, pp. 199–214, doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3649-2_15
  8. Alin, Aylin (September 2010), "Minitab", Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics, 2 (6): 723–727, doi:10.1002/wics.113
  9. Wilkinson, Leland (November 2008), "The Future of Statistical Computing", Technometrics, 50 (4): 418–435, doi:10.1198/004017008000000460, JSTOR 25471520, S2CID 3521989
  10. Chambers, John M.; Ryan, Barbara F. (May 1990), "The ASA Statistical Computing Section: A History", The American Statistician, 44 (2): 87–89, doi:10.2307/2684135, JSTOR 2684135
  11. View/Search Fellows of the ASA, American Statistical Association, archived from the original on 2019-04-25, retrieved 2019-01-29
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