Erich Leo Lehmann

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

• Testing Statistical Hypotheses, 1959
• Basic Concepts of Probability and Statistics, 1964, co-author J. L. Hodges
• Elements of Finite Probability, 1965, co-author J. L. Hodges
• Lehmann, Erich L.; With the special assistance of H. J. M. D'Abrera (2006). Nonparametrics: Statistical methods based on ranks (Reprinting of 1988 revision of 1975 Holden-Day ed.). New York: Springer. pp. xvi+463. ISBN 978-0-387-35212-1. MR 2279708. 
• Theory of Point Estimation, 1983
• Lehmann, Erich L. (1998). Elements of Large-Sample Theory. New York: Springer Verlag. ISBN 978-0-387-98595-4. 
• Reminiscences of a Statistician, 2007, ISBN 978-0-387-71596-4
• Fisher, Neyman, and the Creation of Classical Statistics, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4419-9499-8 [published posthumously]

Articles

• Lehmann, E.L.; Scheffé, H. (1950). "Completeness, similar regions, and unbiased estimation. I.". Sankhyā: the Indian Journal of Statistics 10 (4): 305–340. JSTOR 25048038. MR 39201. 
• Lehmann, E.L.; Scheffé, H. (1955). "Completeness, similar regions, and unbiased estimation. II". Sankhyā: the Indian Journal of Statistics 15 (3): 219–236. JSTOR 25048243. MR 72410. 
• Hodges, J. L.; Lehmann, E. L. (1956). "The efficiency of some nonparametric competitors of the t-test". Annals of Mathematical Statistics 27 (2): 324–335. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177728261. 
• Hodges, J. L.; Lehmann, E. L. (1963). "Estimation of location based on ranks". Annals of Mathematical Statistics 34 (2): 598–611. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177704172. 

References

Further reading

• Brillinger, D. R. (2010). "Erich Leo Lehmann, 1917-2009". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 173 (3): 683–686. doi:10.1111/j.1467-985X.2010.00645_1.x. 

External links

• Erich Leo Lehmann at the Mathematics Genealogy Project