Citizenship United Kingdom Role Statistician Nationality Scottish Doctoral advisor Karl Pearson | Doctoral students M. S. Bartlett Notable students M. S. Bartlett Name John Wishart | |
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Born 28 November 1898
Perth, Scotland ( 1898-11-28 ) Institutions Rothamsted Experimental Station
University of Cambridge Alma mater Edinburgh University
Cambridge University
University College London Died July 14, 1956, Acapulco, Mexico Education University College London, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh | ||
Dr John Wishart (28 November 1898 – 14 July 1956) was a Scottish mathematician and agricultural statistician.
He worked successively at University College London with Karl Pearson, at Rothamsted Experimental Station with Ronald Fisher, and then as a leader in statistics in the University of Cambridge where he became the first Director of the Statistical Laboratory in 1953. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1931, and edited Biometrika from 1937. In 1950 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He first formulated a generalised product-moment distribution named the Wishart distribution in his honour, in 1928.
Wishart drowned aged 57 while swimming in the sea at Revolcadero Beach, Acapulco while representing the Food and Agriculture Organization on a mission to set up a research centre.