David was named after Florence Nightingale, who was a friend of her parents. David was tutored privately by a local parson, beginning at age five. By that age she already knew some arithmetic, so she began with algebra. Since David already knew English, the parson taught her Latin and Greek. At the age of ten, she entered to formal schooling at Colyton Grammar School. She studied mainly mathematics for three years, with the aim of becoming an actuary, but at that time the actuarial firms only accepted men. She earned a degree in Mathematics from Bedford College for Women in 1931. David received a scholarship and continued her studies with Karl Pearson at University College, London, as his research assistant. When Pearson retired, his son Egon, and R. A. Fisher, took over Karl's duties. After Karl Pearson died in 1934, David returned to the Biometrics laboratory to work with Jerzy Neyman, submitting her four most recently published papers as her PhD thesis, and earned a doctorate in 1938.
Career
Working for Karl Pearson, F. N. David computed solutions to complicated multiple integrals, and the distribution of the correlation coefficients. As a result, her first book was released in 1938, called Tables of the Correlation Coefficient. All the calculations were done on a hand-cranked mechanical calculator known as a Brunsviga. During World War II, David worked for the Ministry of Home Security. In late 1939 when war had started but England had not yet been attacked, she created statistical models to predict the possible consequences of bombs exploding in high density populations such as the big cities of England and especially London. From these models, she determined estimates of harm to humans and damage to non-humans. This included the possible numbers living and dead, the reactions to fires and damaged buildings as well as damages to communications, utilities such as phones, water, gas, electricity and sewers. As a result, when the Germans bombed London in 1940 and 1941, vital services were kept going and her models were updated and modified with the evidence from the real harms and real damage. After World War II she returned to University College in London and became a Professor in 1962. In 1968 she moved to California and became a Professor, and in 1970 the Chair, in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Riverside, and was the book review editor for the journal Biometrics for four years. By 1977 she had retired but moved to the University of California, Berkeley where she continued to teach and do research in Biostatistics. David died in 1995.
David's research resulted in advances in combinatorics, including a clear exposition of complicated methods. She studied the Correlation coefficient, and computed solutions of complicated multiple integrals, using the distribution of the correlation coefficient. David investigated the origins and history of probability and statistical ideas. She wrote a book on history of probability, using problems thought of by famous mathematicians and scientists like Cardano and Galileo. It was called Games, Gods and Gambling: The Origins and History of Probability. She "speculat that gambling may be the first invention of human society. Her clue to this is the talus. This most common randomizer of ancient times is a predecessor of the die: the astragalus or talus is the 'knucklebone' or heel bone of a running animal. In creatures such as deer, horse, oxen, sheep and hartebeest this bone is so formed that when it is thrown to land on a level surface it can come to rest in only four ways. Well polished and often engraved examples are regularly found on the sites of ancient Egypt. Tomb illustrations and scoring boards make it virtually certain that these were used for gaming."
Publications
David published ten books and more than 100 papers, including:
1938: Extension of the Markoff theorem on least squares
1948: The probability integral transformation when parameters are estimated from the sample
