Stan is named after Stanislaw Ulam, the inventor of the Monte Carlo method. At one point we were joking around and I came up with the backronym Sampling Through Adaptive Neighborhoods. I kinda like this as a backronym but it was really just a joke. Stan does not stand for Sampling Through Adaptive Neighborhoods. Stan is just Stan.
At one point we were joking around and I came up p < 0.05. I kinda like this as a threshold for deciding that an effect is worth estimating but it was really just a joke. 0.05 does not mean that an effect is real. 0.05 is just 0.05.
+1
Stan really stands for “Stan takes another name” .
On a tangent (!): I always thought it was ironic that Stan’s home neighbourhood is Manhattan, the acme of orthogonal movement.
Where is the picture of Stan’s tomb we took in Cimetière du Montparnasse?!
http://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/07/27/stan-found-using-directed-search/