Institutions Harvard University Notable students Nan Laird Doctoral advisor John Tukey | Fields Statistics Name Arthur Dempster | |
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Alma mater Princeton University (PhD 1956)
University of Toronto (BA 1952; MA 1953) Thesis The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case (1956) Known for Dempster–Shafer theory
EM algorithm Notable awards Putnam Fellow (1961)
ASA Fellow (1964)
IMS Fellow (1963)
Guggenheim Fellow
AAAS Fellow (1997) Education Princeton University (1956) Books Elements of continuous multivariate analysis Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada, R. A. Fisher Lectureship | ||
Arthur Pentland Dempster (born 1929) is a Professor Emeritus in the Harvard University Department of Statistics. He was one of four faculty when the department was founded in 1957.
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Biography
Dempster received his B.A. in mathematics and physics (1952) and M.A. in mathematics (1953), both from the University of Toronto. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton University in 1956. His thesis, titled The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case, was written under the supervision of John Tukey.
Academic works
Among his contributions to statistics are the Dempster–Shafer theory and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm.
Selected publications
Honors and awards
Dempster was a Putnam Fellow in 1951. He was elected to ASA Fellow in 1964, IMS Fellow in 1963, and AAAS Fellow in 1997.