But by 1986 the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences had issued a report in response to Simon's ideas that largely validated his work, and turned almost wholly away from the previous National Academy report on the subject. This method gets rid of all the formulae, tables, and mathematical magic which have driven generations of confused and frustrated university students to curses and tears, and substitutes simulated experiments which are easy to understand by everyone from professors down to seventh graders. Simon has been developing and publishing these methods since the 1960's. Development of the bootstrap method by Bradley Efron in the late 1970's has given wide legitimacy to the use of resampling methods. Other computer languages such as Basic, Pascal, and Minitab require complex and counter-intuitive programs in carry out the simplest resampling operations.
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And critics abound who take a different view of the matter than Simon. Indeed, there is no question that Efron originated the investigation of the properties of one sub-category of resampling, the bootstrap, in such convincing fashion that mathematical statisticians throughout the world have leaped onto his bandwagon. That is an extraordinary achievement. But that should not obscure Simon's earlier achievement of staking out the entire field and showing what the bootstrap and other methods could do, even if Simon did not also begin the study, as Efron did, of what the method could not do. Critics also say, more personally, that Simon loses his claim to discovery of the resampling method because he did not develop it, instead working on other topics.