Pat Moran (statistician)

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Pat Moran
Born	July 14, 1917(1917-07-14) King's Cross, Sydney, Australia
Died	September 19, 1988 (aged 71) Cambridge, UK
Residence	Australia, UK
Nationality	Australian
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	CSIR Oxford University ANU
Alma mater	University of Sydney University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	Abram Besicovitch
Doctoral students	Warren Ewens Charles E. M. Pearce
Known for	Population genetics
Notes 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.

1 Early years
2 Career
3 Moran trivia
4 Publications
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Early years

Moran was born in Sydney and was the only child of Herbert Michael Moran (b. 1885 in Sydney, d. 1945 in Cambridge UK), a prominent surgeon, and Eva (née Mann) (b. 1887 in Sydney, d. 1977 in Sydney). Patrick did have five other siblings, but they all died at or shortly after birth. 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, in 1934, he commenced study at the University of Sydney he studied chemistry, zoology, maths and physics, graduating with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1937. Patrick Moran was then educated further at Cambridge University from 1937-39 and 1945-6. 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. He graduated with an MA (by proxy) from St John's College, Cambridge, on January 22, 1943. He was admitted to Balliol College, Oxford University, on December 3, 1946. He was awarded an MA, from Oxford University, by incorporation in 1947.

[edit] Career

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 also gave lecture courses. Patrick Moran was appointed University Lecturer in Mathematics in 1951, at Oxford, without stipend, for as long as he held the post of senior research officer in the Institute of Statistics.

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.

On January 1, 1951, Moran was appointed foundation Professor of statistics at the National University of Canberra 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 Emeritus Professor and worked on statistical methods in particular epidemiological methods and their application to psychiatry. He was awarded an honorary ScD degree from Cambridge, on October 29, 1963, and a DSc from Sydney.

Moran died after 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] Moran trivia

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

His husky voice was due to the fact that his vocal cords were damaged by a tracheotomy.
Once asked at a cocktail party 'Are you a full professor?' his reply was 'No, I've only had one beer so far'.
A famous anecdote is that he once appositely compared the sound of a rocket firing with the tearing sound of silk underwear.
Both his undergraduate supervisor at Sydney, H.S. Carslaw, and E. Cunningham at Cambridge, advised Moran to go into medicine and not mathematics, believing that he had poor mathematical ability
Although he turned out to have a brilliant mathematical career, he had difficulty with simple arithmetic and wrote himself, 'Arithmetic I could not do'.^[2]

[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.