Estimation of the radius of a circle when the coordinates of a number of points on its circumference are observed : an example of bootstrapping

The bootstrap (Efron, 1979, 1982) is a very simple resampling plan and has shown to be successful in estimating the bias and other measures of statistical error of a number of estimators. It gives freedom from the constraints of traditional parametric theory at the cost of performing the usual statistical calculations a hundred or a thousand times over. In this letter another example of bootstrap estimation of bias is given. It is interesting that Quenouille's (1949) jackknife (see Miller, 1964, for a review) fails completely in this case.