Died 14 March 1996 | ||
Maurice Charles Kenneth Tweedie, British medical physicist and statistician from the University of Liverpool, was born in Reading, England September 30, 1919 and died March 14, 1996. He read physics at the University of Reading and attained a B.Sc. (general) and B.Sc. (special) in physics in 1939 followed by a M.Sc. in physics 1941. He found a career in radiation physics, but his primary interest was in mathematical statistics where his accomplishments far surpassed his academic postings. This included pioneering work with the inverse Gaussian distribution. Arguably his major achievement rests with the definition of a family of exponential dispersion models characterized by closure under additive and reproductive convolution as well as under transformations of scale that are now known as the Tweedie exponential dispersion models. As a consequence of these properties the Tweedie exponential dispersion models are characterized by a power law relationship between the variance and the mean which leads them to become the foci of convergence for a central limit like effect that acts on a wide variety of random data. The range of application of the Tweedie distributions is wide and includes: