Introduction to Efron (1979) Bootstrap Methods: Another Look at the Jackknife

It is not unusual, in the history of statistics, that an important paper goes scarcely noticed for a decade or longer. Examples from the past half-century include von Mises’ (1937,1947) papers on statistical functionals, Quenouille’s (1949) paper, Tukey’s (1956) abstract on the jackknife, and Wald’s (1943) paper on the asymptotic optimality of likelihood ratio tests. Each of these pioneering works was well ahead of its time. Brad Efron’s (1979) paper on the bootstrap sparked immediate interest among his peers. A decade after its publication, the bootstrap literature is large and still growing, with no immediate end in sight. Surely, the timing and formulation of Efron’s paper were just right. But what were the yearnings in the statistical world of 1979 that the paper touched so well? Why did development of the bootstrap idea follow so swiftly?