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John Wishart
Times obituary
Dr. John Wishart, Reader in Statistics at the University of Cambridge, was drowned last Saturday in a bathing accident at Acapulco, Mexico. He was in Central America on behalf of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to organize a research centre for the teaching of statistics in agricultural research. He was 57
He was born in Perth on November 28, 1898, and was educated at Perth Academy and Edinburgh University, where he was one of the many able mathematicians taught by Sir Edmund Whittaker. Subsequent to leaving Edinburgh and after two years' teaching at Leeds, he went in 1924 to the Galton Laboratory as a research assistant to Professor Karl Pearson. He stayed there for three years and, after a brief period at Imperial College, joined the staff of the Rothamsted Experimental Station in the statistical department just at the beginning of its great period of expansion under Sir Ronald Fisher's inspiring leadership. He made his mark there and left to become Reader in Statistics at Cambridge in 1931.
During the last war, he served as a captain in the Intelligence Corps from 1940 to 1942 and was a temporary assistant secretary at the Admiralty from 1942 to 1946. He was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and of the American Statistical Association, a member of the International Institute of Statistics, and an associate editor of the journal Biometrika.
He was the author of three books on field experimentation and many research papers on mathematical statistics in scientific journals. Perhaps his best work was done at Cambridge between 1931 and 1939 when, as a result of his teaching, a number of Cambridge mathematicians took up statistics as a career and did much to spread the knowledge of statistics as a scientific subject with almost unlimited potentialities in many diverse fields of application.
His widow and two sons survive him.
Dr. John Wishart, Reader in Statistics at the University of Cambridge, was drowned last Saturday in a bathing accident at Acapulco, Mexico. He was in Central America on behalf of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to organize a research centre for the teaching of statistics in agricultural research. He was 57
He was born in Perth on November 28, 1898, and was educated at Perth Academy and Edinburgh University, where he was one of the many able mathematicians taught by Sir Edmund Whittaker. Subsequent to leaving Edinburgh and after two years' teaching at Leeds, he went in 1924 to the Galton Laboratory as a research assistant to Professor Karl Pearson. He stayed there for three years and, after a brief period at Imperial College, joined the staff of the Rothamsted Experimental Station in the statistical department just at the beginning of its great period of expansion under Sir Ronald Fisher's inspiring leadership. He made his mark there and left to become Reader in Statistics at Cambridge in 1931.
During the last war, he served as a captain in the Intelligence Corps from 1940 to 1942 and was a temporary assistant secretary at the Admiralty from 1942 to 1946. He was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and of the American Statistical Association, a member of the International Institute of Statistics, and an associate editor of the journal Biometrika.
He was the author of three books on field experimentation and many research papers on mathematical statistics in scientific journals. Perhaps his best work was done at Cambridge between 1931 and 1939 when, as a result of his teaching, a number of Cambridge mathematicians took up statistics as a career and did much to spread the knowledge of statistics as a scientific subject with almost unlimited potentialities in many diverse fields of application.
His widow and two sons survive him.
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