Erich Leo Lehmann

This article is about the statistician. For the athlete, see Erich Lehmann (athlete).
Erich Lehmann
Born 20 November 1917
Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, German Empire
Died 12 September 2009 (aged 91)
Nationality American
Fields Statistics
Institutions University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater Doctor of Philosophy - University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor Jerzy Neyman
Doctoral students Peter J. Bickel
Known for Testing Statistical Hypotheses
Completeness (statistics)
Lehmann–Scheffé theorem
Hodges–Lehmann estimator
nonparametric tests
Influences Abraham Wald
Henry Scheffé
Alfred Tarski
Notable awards President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Fellow of the American Statistical Association
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
National Academy of Science.

Erich Leo Lehmann (20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009) was an American statistician, who made a major contribution to nonparametric hypothesis testing.[1] He is one of the eponyms of the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and of the Hodges–Lehmann estimator of the median of a population.

Early life

Lehmann was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine in 1917 to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. He grew up in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, until the Machtergreifung in 1933 his family fled to Switzerland to escape the Nazis.[1] He graduated from high school in Zurich, and studied mathematics for two years at Trinity College, Cambridge. Following that, he emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York in late 1940. He enrolled in University of California, Berkeley as a post-graduate student—albeit without a prior degree—in 1941.[2]

Career

Lehmann obtained his MA in mathematics in 1942 and his PhD (under Jerzy Neyman) in 1946, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1942.[2] From August 1944 to August 1945 he worked as an operations analyst for the United States Air Force on Guam.[2] He taught at Columbia University and at Princeton University during 1950–51, and then during 1951–1952 he was a visiting associate professor at Stanford University.

He was an editor of "The Annals of Mathematical Statistics" and president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science.

In 1997, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, the department of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley created the Erich Lehmann Fund in Statistics[3] to support the students of the department.

Selected publications

Books

Articles

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Nanette Asimov (October 16, 2009). "Erich L. Lehmann – Berkeley professor – dies". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2009-12-12.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Rojo, E.L. (2011). "Erich Leo Lehmann—A Glimpse into his Life and Work". The Annals of Statistics 39 (5): 2244–2265. doi:10.1214/11-AOS927.
  3. Erich Lehmann Fund in Statistics

Further reading

External links