John Wishart

John Wishart (born November 28, 1898 in Montrose , Scotland , † July 14, 1956 in Acapulco , Mexico ) was a Scottish statistician.

Life

Wishart grew up in Perth in Scotland, went to school there and studied from 1916 at the University of Edinburgh , where he also attended lectures by ET Whittaker . With the beginning of the First World War his university education was interrupted and he did his military service in the British Army . In 1922 he was able to finish his studies with degrees in mathematics and physics. He then worked as a teacher at a high school in Leeds . On the recommendation of Whittaker he was in 1924 assistant at University College London with Karl Pearson , where he worked on the creation of tables of the incomplete beta function and specialized in the field of mathematical statistics . After receiving his doctorate, he moved to Ronald Fisher at the Rothamsted Experimental Station as an assistant for statistics . In 1931 he went to the University of Cambridge . There he became a lecturer in statistics at the agricultural faculty. During the Second World War he worked from 1940 to 1942 in the military secret service and then in the British Admiralty . After the war he returned to Cambridge University and was head of the Statistical Laboratory from 1953.

In a work from 1928 he developed a special probability distribution, a matrix-variant equivalent of the χ ² -distribution . It was later named Wishart distribution .

In 1931 Wishart was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . He was also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association .

In 1956, Wishart died in a swimming accident in Acapulco.

Fonts (selection)

John Wishart: The generalized product moment distribution in samples from a normal multivariate population . In: Biometrika . 20A, no. 1-2 , 1928, pp. 32-52 , doi : 10.2307 / 2331939 .
John Wishart: Growth-rate determinations in nutrition studies with the bacon pig, and their analysis . In: Biometrika . tape 30 , no. 1-2 , 1938, pp. 16-28 , doi : 10.2307 / 2332221 .
John Wishart: Moment coefficients of the k-statistics in samples from a finite population . In: Biometrika . tape 39 , no. 1-2 , 1952, pp. 1-13 , doi : 10.2307 / 2332458 .

literature

ES Pearson: John Wishart, 1898-1956 . In: Biometrika . tape 44 , no. 1-2 , 1957, pp. 1–8 , doi : 10.1093 / biomet / 44.1-2.1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed May 15, 2020 .

personal data
SURNAME	Wishart, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Scottish statistician
DATE OF BIRTH	November 28, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH	Montrose (Angus)
DATE OF DEATH	July 14, 1956
Place of death	Acapulco

[1] Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed May 15, 2020 .