Cedric Smith

Cedric Austen Bardell Smith (born February 5, 1917 in Leicester , † January 10, 2002 ) was a British mathematician and mathematical statistician.

Smith studied at Cambridge University (Trinity College) with a degree in 1938 and then a doctorate. During the Second World War he worked as a Quaker (he joined the Quakers in 1937) at a hospital. From 1946 he was at the Galton Laboratory of the University of London , where he was Lecturer in 1948 , Reader in 1957 and Professor in 1964 ( Weldon Professor of Biometry ). In 1982 he officially retired, but was still scientifically active.

He dealt with the applications of statistics in biology, especially genetics. Initially he published with JBS Haldane in the field (Probability of Relationships). He also dealt with combinatorics (graph theory), application of mathematics to peace issues, game theory, phonetics, fingerprints, elliptical functions.

With his fellow students from Trinity College William Thomas Tutte , R. Leonard Brooks (1916-1993) and Arthur Harold Stone (1916-2000) he published under the pseudonym Blanche Descartes . All four also solved the problem of squaring the square (dividing a square into smaller squares) in 1940 .

Smith published a solution to the counterfeit coin problem (finding it out by minimum number of reciprocal weighing with a beam balance of 12 coins) and the general solution as Blanche Descartes in 1947.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and the ISI. He was co-editor of the Annals of Human Genetics.

He was married to the Hungarian Piroska Vermes (daughter of the mathematician Paul Vermes ) and had a son with her.

Fonts

• Biomathematics: he principles of mathematics for students of biological science , 3rd edition, New York: Hafner 1954 (originally by William Moses Feldman (1879–1939))

Web links

• Brooks, Smith, Stone, Tutte, I, Squaring Net