I'm sending this reply for the statistics people on SAS-L. Here are two nice resources I stumbled upon.

"MathSearch" a search tool for 90,000 pages from math and statistics web servers around the world. http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au:8000/MathSearch.html

A large collection of quotations about math and stat topics made available by Prof. Mark Woodward, Furman University. http://math.furman.edu/~mwoodard/data.html

In the above collection, the quotation is attributed to Rutherford and cited in Norman T.J. Bailey "The Mathematical Approach to Biology and Medicine", John Wiley, 1967.

Dennis Mar, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif. Computing Services, mar@nps.navy.mil, 408-656-2672.

> Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 16:03:16 -0500 > From: Alan Rimm-Kaufman <rimmkaufman@CRUTCHFIELD.COM> > Subject: Origin of "If you need statistics..." > > "If you need statistics, you should have done a better experiment." > > I've heard this quote offhandedly attributed to Ernest Rutherford, > but I've been unable to find it in any quotation references. > Does anyone from SAS-L know if Rutherford said this, or the correct > source for this quote? > Thanks for the help, somewhat off topic -- Alan