Walter-Ulrich Behrens (1902 – 24 August 1962) was a German chemist and statistician who co-discovered with

Ronald Fisher Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who a ...

the Behrens-Fisher problem and the associated Behrens-Fisher distribution.

Biography

Born in Leipzig, Behrens studied natural sciences and chemistry at the University of Leipzig, and graduated with a doctorate in 1924. After a short period at the university's Institute of Physical Chemistry, he worked for several years at the Agricultural Experimental Station in Leipzig-Mockern. In 1927 he joined the Institute for Agriculture and Plant Breeding of the University of Koenigsberg as a scientific assistant and in 1932 became scientific chief assistant at the Institute of Agricultural Chemistry and Bacteriology (later the Institute for Plant Nutrition and Soil Biology). After having his application for

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

blocked on political grounds in the early 1930s, he was forced to leave academia and became scientific director at the agricultural experimental station of the German agricultural chemicals company , based in Hanover. He worked there from May 1935 until his death. Meanwhile he was sent as Soldier to Russia in the Second World War. After his war captivity he returned to hanover, where his wife Grita and his three Children Ralf, Reiner und Uta used to live. From the late 1920s onwards he also contributed to the theory of

non-parametric statistics Nonparametric statistics is a type of statistical analysis that makes minimal assumptions about the underlying distribution of the data being studied. Often these models are infinite-dimensional, rather than finite dimensional, as in parametric s ...

, and developed methods for cases involving single and two samples. In 1933 Behrens published ''Mathematische Methoden fur Versuchsansteller'' ('Mathematical Methods for Experimenters').

References

External links

*''Obituary: Dr Walter-Ulrich Behrens'' by O. Heinisch ''Biometrics'' vol18 (4) December 1962 p 63

{{DEFAULTSORT:Behrens, Walter 1902 births 1962 deaths German statisticians 20th-century German chemists Leipzig University alumni