Arthur Pentland Dempster (born 1929) is a Professor Emeritus in the

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

Department of Statistics. He was one of four faculty when the department was founded in 1957.

Biography

Dempster received his B.A. in mathematics and physics (1952) and M.A. in mathematics (1953), both from the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institu ...

. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

in 1956. His thesis, titled ''The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case'', was written under the supervision of

John Tukey John Wilder Tukey (; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distributi ...

Academic works

Among his contributions to statistics are the

Dempster–Shafer theory The theory of belief functions, also referred to as evidence theory or Dempster–Shafer theory (DST), is a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty, with understood connections to other frameworks such as probability, possibility and i ...

and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm.

Selected publications

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Honors and awards

Dempster was a

Putnam Fellow The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada (regar ...

in 1951. He was elected as an

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuous ...

Fellow in 1964, an

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts ...

Fellow in 1963, and an

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, ...

Fellow in 1997.

References

External links

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Homepage on Harvard University
American statisticians 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Princeton University alumni Harvard University faculty Putnam Fellows Fellows of the American Statistical Association Living people 1929 births University of Toronto alumni Mathematical statisticians {{US-statistician-stub