This obituary is part of a series about people who died from the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.
By the time Leo A. Goodman started working on statistics in the early 1950s, social science researchers had a problem. It was easy enough to quantify the relationship between two numerical measurements – for example, how height correlates with income level. But what about non-numeric categories like race and occupation?
There were statistical methods from the natural sciences like physics, but they were crude and imprecise when applied to population data. At the same time, post-war America saw a boom in data of all kinds: census research, public polls, marketing surveys, and mountains of information gathered from millions of men who served in World War II.
It was a gold mine for sociologists, and Professor Goodman gave them the tools to dig in.
He joined the University of Chicago in 1950 as the 22-year-old Assistant Professor of Sociology and Statistics and almost immediately began producing seminal papers that revolutionized both fields. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career – he only retired in 2017 when he was 89 – he developed not only the framework for analyzing large amounts of categorical data, but also the statistical tools to show relationships between these categories .
His work had an immediate and lasting impact on the study of topics such as poverty and social mobility. And as sophisticated quantitative analysis migrated to other areas, so did his methods. Today, his influence can be felt in fields as diverse as management studies and computer science, where some of his statistical modeling tools are applied to machine learning.
Professor Goodman died on December 22nd in a hospital in Berkeley, California. He was 92 years old. The cause was complications from Covid-19, said his son Andy.
“Leo changed the way categorical data is analyzed,” said Yu Xie, a Princeton sociologist. “He was a genius, a legend.”
Leo Aria Goodman was born in Brooklyn on August 7, 1928. His parents, Abraham Goodman and Mollie (Sacks) Goodman, were Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to the Borough Park neighborhood, where Leo grew up. His father worked for Mollie Goodman’s father, who owned a textile factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Leo was only 16 years old when he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Four years later he was valedictorian in his class at Syracuse University, where he studied mathematics and sociology. It only took him two years to do a PhD in mathematics from Princeton.
Perhaps against a personality type for a math prodigy, Professor Goodman was sociable and quickly made friends: at the University of Chicago he was close to the writer Saul Bellow and the sociologist David Riesman, an author of “The Lonely Crowd”.
He married Ann Davidow, a children’s author, in 1960 just before the couple moved to Cambridge University in England, where Professor Goodman was on a scholarship. It was there that Ms. Goodman met again with her roommate at Smith College, the poet Sylvia Plath, who passed out over her friend’s new husband.
“I can’t tell you how much he impressed us,” she wrote in a 1960 letter to Mrs. Goodman. “So brilliant, friendly, versatile and so good-looking. One match, one match. “
A few months later, the Goodmans sponsored Mrs. Plath’s first child, Frieda Hughes.
He and his wife later divorced. In addition to his son Andy, he survived another son, Tom; his sister Janice Towers; and five grandchildren.
Professor Goodman did much of his early work with William Kruskal, a mathematician at the University of Chicago. Three of the analytical tools they developed and named after them – Goodman-Kruskal Lambda, Gamma, and Tau – are still widely used in statistical software.
He moved to the University of California at Berkeley in 1986, a few years after developing a rare form of cancer. His doctors wanted to amputate his right leg, but he digged into the medical literature and discovered that chemotherapy and new forms of therapy could save it.
Although the doctors eventually removed the quadriceps in his leg, after several years of physical therapy he was barely able to hobble. When colleagues passed him on campus and asked how he was doing, he replied, “Not good,” and after a while added, “Great!”
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