Howard Wainer  Howard Wainer (born 1943) is an American statistician, past principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and author, known for his contributions in the fields of statistics, psychometrics, and statistical graphics. Howard Wainer was born Howard Charles Goldhaber in Brooklyn, New York on October 26, 1943. In 1948 his father Meyer Goldhaber, an anatomist by education and a dentist by profession, died of complications from a bleeding ulcer at the age of 35. Howard, his brother and his mother moved in with his mother's parents. After two years his mother married Sam Wainer, a local businessman, and the family relocated to Long Island. Howard was formally adopted by his mother's new husband and took the surname Wainer. Early on Wainer showed an aptitude for science and mathematics. In 1960, at the end of his junior year in high school, he was accepted into a National Science Foundation honors program at Columbia University. He spent two hours traveling on subway and bus each way to and from Columbia, learning about Markov chains and number theory in the morning and working on the IBM 650 computer in the afternoon. Wainer's experiences at Columbia motivated him to continue his studies along similar lines. He matriculated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1961 to study mathematics. It was at R.P.I. that Wainer first encountered psychometrics. There, Professor George Boguslavsky was so impressed with his abilities and enthusiasm that he recommended Wainer for a Psychometric Fellowship at Princeton University under Harold Gulliksen. Wainer received his B.S. from R.P.I. in mathematics in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in psychometrics in 1968. Howard Wainer began his teaching career at Temple University in 1968, staying on as an assistant professor until 1970. After Temple he taught at the University of Chicago, as a member of the Committee on Methodology in the department of Behavioral Sciences until 1977. Wainer then moved to Washington DC to join the Bureau of Social Science Research, a nonprofit organization that focused on policy research. During his time in DC Wainer also joined with Richard Roistacher and Barbara Noble in founding Multiple Technical Services, a small firm that provided statistical and computational advice to the DC research community. In 1980 he moved to Princeton NJ to become a principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, a position he held for 21 years.