Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran

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**Pat Moran**
Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran
Born	July 14, 1917 Sydney, Australia
Died	September 19, 1988 Cambridge, UK
Residence	Australia, UK
Nationality	Australian
Field	Mathematician
Institution	CSIR Oxford University ANU
Alma Mater	University of Sydney University of Cambridge
Academic Advisor	Abram Besicovitch
Notable Students	Warren Ewens Charles E. M. Pearce
Known for	Population genetics
Note he did not obtain a PhD, but Abram Besicovitch is considered to be his equivalent mentor by scientific genealogy authorities [1].

Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran (July 14, 1917 - September 19, 1988), commonly known as Pat Moran was an Australian statistician who made significant contributions to probability theory and its application to population and evolutionary genetics.

Moran was born in Sydney, his father Herbert Moran was a prominent surgeon. He completed his high school studies at St Stanislaus College in Bathurst, in three and a half years instead of the normal five year course. At age 16 he commenced study at the University of Sydney, he studied chemistry, zoology, maths and physics, graduating with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1937. Following graduation he went to study at Cambridge University, his supervisors noted that he was not a good mathematician and the outbreak of World War II interrupted his studies.

During the War Moran worked in rocket development in the Ministry of Supply and later at the External Ballistics Laboratory in Cambridge. In late 1943 he joined the Australian Scientific Liaison Office (ASLO), run by the CSIR. He worked on applied physics including vision, camouflage, army signals, quality control, road research, infra-red detection, metrology, UHF radio propagation, general radar, bomb-fragmentation, rockets and asdics and on operational research. He also wrote some papers on the Hausdorff measure during the War.

After the War, Moran returned to Cambridge where he was supervised by Frederick Smithies and worked unsuccessfully on determining the nature of the set of points of divergence of Fourier integrals of functions in the class L^p, when l < p <2. He gave up on this project and was employed as a Senior Research Officer at the Institute of Statistics at Oxford University. He married in 1946 after his appointment; he and his wife Jean Mavis Frame had three children. At Oxford Moran wrote several papers on the nonlinear breeding cycle of the Canadian Lynx. He was made a lecturer at Oxford in 1951 but left the university later that year for Australia. He never acquired a PhD, "a fact he would recall with some pride in later life" recalls Hall.

Moran was appointed foundation Professor of statistics at the Australian National University in the Research School of Social Sciences. He worked on the stochastic study of dam theory, and on population genetics, publishing his first paper "Random processes in genetics" in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1958 and culminating in his 1962 book The Statistical Processes of Evolutionary Theory. He also worked on geometric probability.

He retired from ANU at the end of 1982; he stayed on as Emertius Professor and worked on statistical methods in particular epidemiological methods and their application to psychiatry. He was awarded a honorary Sc.D. degree from Cambridge and a D.Sc. from Sydney.

Moran died following a stroke in 1988. The Moran Medal, created in his honour, is awarded by the Australian Academy of Science every two years for distinguished work in statistics by an Australian statistician.

[edit] Publications

In addition to over 170 papers, Moran wrote 4 books,

The Theory of Storage (1959; translated into Russian, 1963; Czech, 1967)
The Statistical Processes of Evolutionary Theory (1962; translated into Russian, 1973)
(With M.G. Kendall) Geometrical Probability (1963; translated into Russian, 1972)
An Introduction to Probability Theory (1967)

[edit] References

Heyde, C.C. 1992. Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran 1917-1988. Historical Records of Australian Science 1:17-30.
Hall, P. G. 1989 Obituary: Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran 1917-1988, Biometrics, Vol. 45, pp. 687-692.