David George Kendall

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David George Kendall (born January 15, 1918 in Ripon , Yorkshire , England , † October 23, 2007 in Cambridge ) was one of the leading authorities in the field of applied probability and data analysis . The Kendall notation he developed to describe waiting systems became known .

David Kendall, Oberwolfach 1971

life and work

Kendall studied at Oxford University (Queen's College), where he made his master's degree in 1943. His original goal was to become an astrophysicist (on which he published a paper in 1938 in the Zeitschrift für Astrophysik and in which he also received a scholarship), but he soon got into the pure mathematics of hard analysis , which he learned from Hardy's students US Haslam-Jones and heard from Edward Charles Titchmarsh . During World War II he worked in a rocket research group in Wales (Aberforth) under William Cook and later Louis Rosenhead. There also worked Robert Alexander Rankin and Kendall came over the acting there also Maurice Bartlett (and Frank Anscombe) in contact with statistics. In 1946 he became a Fellow of Magdalen College and Lecturer at Oxford University. In 1952/53 he was at Princeton University , where he had contacts with William Feller (and John W. Tukey ), but also met Joseph L. Doob , Mark Kac and Kai Lai Chung in the USA . In 1962 he became Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Churchill College there. Until 1973, when he passed on to his successor Peter Whittle , he was director of the Statistical Laboratory in Cambridge. From 1985 he was Professor Emeritus and from 1989 Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College.

Among other things, he dealt with queuing theory (which he dealt with discrete Markov chains in the early 1950s ), stochastic processes and stochastic geometry, as well as various applications such as statistics of epidemics, the probability of comets escaping from the solar system, applications of statistics in archeology (with which He examined, among other things, the data of Flinders Petrie on the dating of layers in Egypt according to the type of broken fragments), data analysis of civil registry registers, theory of earth dams, population growth. With Harry Reuter he investigated Markov processes in continuous time with an infinite number of possible values ​​of the variables in the 1950s , treated about the theory of semigroups of operators, with which he and Reuter showed the applicability limits of Kolmogorov's differential equations for these processes and the access by Kolmogorow, Doob and others and that of the semi-groups of operators by Kōsaku Yosida and Einar Hille . In 1954 he gave a lecture at the ICM in Amsterdam (with Reuter: Some pathological Markov processes with a denumerable infinity of states and the associated semigroups of operators on I). Kendall was close friends with Jerzy Neyman .

Kendall was elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society in 1964 , which awarded him the New Year's Eve Medal in 1976 from 1967 to 1969 and in 1982/1983 he was on its council. The Royal Statistical Society awarded him the Guy Medal in gold in 1981 for his work , after he had already received the Guy Medal in silver in 1955. In 1980 he received the Wilks Prize from Princeton University. From 1972 to 1974 he was President of the London Mathematical Society , whose Senior Whitehead Prize he received in 1980 and whose De Morgan Medal he received in 1989. In 1975 he was President of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistical and Probability. In 1982 he was chairman of the mathematics and physics section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences (1992) and multiple honorary doctorates.

Kendall had been married to Diana Fletcher since 1952, with whom he had six children, including probability theorist Wilfrid Kendall.

He should not be confused with the British statistician Maurice George Kendall .

Fonts

  • Editor with FR Hodson, P. Tautu: Mathematics in the Archaeological and Historical Sciences, Mamaia 1970, Edinburgh University Press 1971 (with his contribution: Seriation from abundance matrices)
  • Editor with EF Harding: Stochastic Analysis, Wiley 1973 (with his contribution: An introduction to stochastic analysis, pp. 3–43)
  • Edited with EF Harding: Stochastic Geometry, Wiley 1974
  • with D. Barden, TKCarne, H.Le: Shape and Shape Theory, Wiley 1999
  • Some problems and methods in statistical archeology, World Archeology Vol. 1, 1969, pp. 68-76
  • Some problems in the theory of comets , and The distribution of energy perturbations for Halley's and some other comets , in Jerzy Neyman (editor), Proceedings of the 4th Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistica and Probability, 1961
  • Stochastic processes occurring in the theory of queues and their analysis by the method of the imbedded Markov chain , Annals Math. Statistics Vol. 24, 1953, pp. 338-354
  • Some problems in the theory of queues , J. Royal Statistical Society B, Vol. 13, 1951, pp. 151-173

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ as a student he heard James Jeans lectures on the radio. In Oxford he heard astronomy from among others HH Plaskett and Edward Arthur Milne . Later he wrote papers on the application of stochastics to comets.
  2. ↑ Hardy had moved from Oxford to Cambridge since 1931. Kendall studied Hardy's Pure Mathematics as a student on the recommendation of his teacher
  3. ↑ Kendall kept silent about what exactly he was doing there until the 1990s. In 1996/97 he published two articles with K. Post, The British 3 Inch Antiaircraft Rocket , Notes Rec.R. Soc., Vol. 50, 1996, p. 229, Vol. 51 1997, p. 133
  4. ^ Son of Ernst Reuter , professor of mathematics at Durham University
personal data
SURNAME Kendall, David George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English statistician and authority on applied probability and data analysis
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Ripon , Yorkshire , England
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 2007
Place of death Cambridge