Jerzy Neyman

Polish mathematician and statistician

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Jerzy Neyman (born April 16, 1894, Bendery, Bessarabia, Russia [now Tighina, Moldova]—died August 5, 1981, Oakland, California, U.S.) was a Polish mathematician and statistician who, working in Russian, Polish, and then English, helped to establish the statistical theory of hypothesis testing. Neyman was a principal founder of modern theoretical statistics. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Science.

Neyman was born into a Polish-speaking family and was raised in Bessarabia, the Crimea, and Ukraine under the Russian Empire. After serving as a lecturer at the Institute of Technology, Kharkov, in Ukraine, from 1917 to 1921, Neyman was appointed statistician of the Institute of Agriculture at Bydgoszcz, Poland. In 1923 he became a lecturer at the College of Agriculture, Warsaw, and he joined the faculty of the University of Warsaw in 1928. He served on the staff of University College, London, from 1934 to 1938, and then immigrated to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, becoming chairman of a new department of statistics in 1955 and residing as a U.S. citizen for the rest of his life. At Berkeley he built, with the help of a growing number of statisticians and mathematicians who studied under him, what became known as a leading world centre for mathematical statistics. A highly successful series of symposia on probability and statistics were carried out under his guidance.

Neyman’s work in mathematical statistics, which includes theories of estimation and of testing hypotheses, has found wide application in genetics, medical diagnosis, astronomy, meteorology, and agricultural experimentation. He was noted especially for combining theory and its applications in his thinking.