James Orvis Berger (born April 6, 1950, in

Minneapolis, Minnesota Minneapolis is a city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States, and its county seat. With a population of 429,954 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the state's List of cities in Minnesota, most populous city. Locat ...

) is an American

statistician A statistician is a person who works with Theory, theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private sector, private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, a ...

best known for his work on

Bayesian statistics Bayesian statistics ( or ) is a theory in the field of statistics based on the Bayesian interpretation of probability, where probability expresses a ''degree of belief'' in an event. The degree of belief may be based on prior knowledge about ...

and

decision theory Decision theory or the theory of rational choice is a branch of probability theory, probability, economics, and analytic philosophy that uses expected utility and probabilities, probability to model how individuals would behave Rationality, ratio ...

. He won the

COPSS Presidents' Award The COPSS Presidents' Award is given annually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a young statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics Statistics (from German language, Ger ...

, one of the two highest awards in statistics, in 1985 at the age of 35. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

in 1974. He was a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

until 1997, at which time he moved to the Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences (now the Department of Statistical Science) at

Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...

, where he is currently the Arts and Sciences Professor of Statistics. He was also director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute from 2002 to 2010, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago since 2011.

Contributions to science

Berger has worked on the decision theoretic bases of

Bayesian inference Bayesian inference ( or ) is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to calculate a probability of a hypothesis, given prior evidence, and update it as more information becomes available. Fundamentally, Bayesian infer ...

, including advances on the

Stein Stein may refer to: Places Austria * Stein, a neighbourhood of Krems an der Donau, Lower Austria * Stein, Styria, a municipality in the district of Fürstenfeld, Styria * Stein (Lassing), a village in the district of Liezen, Styria * Stein a ...

phenomenon during and after his thesis. He has also greatly contributed to advances in the so-called objective Bayes approach where prior distributions are constructed from the structure of the sampling distributions and/or of frequentist properties. He is also recognized for his analysis of the opposition between Bayesian and frequentist visions on testing statistical hypotheses, with criticisms of the use of

p-values In null-hypothesis significance testing, the ''p''-value is the probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the result actually observed, under the assumption that the null hypothesis is correct. A very small ''p''-value means ...

and critical levels.

Awards and honors

Berger has received numerous awards for his work:

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

, the

and the

R. A. Fisher Lectureship The COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship (formerly known as R. A. Fisher Award and Lectureship) is a very high recognition of achievement and scholarship in statistical science that recognizes the highly significant impact of stati ...

. He was elected as a Fellow of the

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 ...

and to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

in 2003. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by

Bibliography

* *

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Berger, Jim Duke University faculty Fellows of the American Statistical Association Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Cornell University alumni Living people 1950 births Scientists from Minneapolis Annals of Statistics editors American mathematical statisticians Bayesian statisticians