The Professorship of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge was established in 1961 [1] with the support of the Royal Statistical Society and the aid of donations from various companies and banks. [2] [3] It was the first professorship in the Statistical Laboratory, and the first in Cambridge University explicitly intended for the study of statistics. Until 1973 the professor was ex officio Director of the Statistical Laboratory.
Brian David Josephson is a Welsh theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge. Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University. Josephson is the only Welshman to have won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared the prize with physicists Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, who jointly received half the award for their own work on quantum tunnelling.
Alexander Philip Dawid is Emeritus Professor of Statistics of the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He is a leading proponent of Bayesian statistics.
Sir David Roxbee Cox is a prominent British statistician.
Peter Whittle is a mathematician and statistician from New Zealand, working in the fields of stochastic nets, optimal control, time series analysis, stochastic optimisation and stochastic dynamics. From 1967 to 1994, he was the Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research at the University of Cambridge.
Sir David John Cameron MacKay was a British physicist, mathematician, and academic. He was the Regius Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and from 2009 to 2014 was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). MacKay authored the book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.
Sir David John Spiegelhalter is a British statistician and Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher.
Sir John Frank Charles Kingman is a British mathematician. He served as N. M. Rothschild and Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge from 2001 until 2006, when he was succeeded by David Wallace. He is known for developing the mathematics of the Coalescent theory, a theoretical model of inheritance, which is fundamental to modern population genetics.
The Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge comprises the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). It is housed in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences site in West Cambridge, alongside the Isaac Newton Institute. Many distinguished mathematicians have been members of the faculty.
Dennis Victor Lindley was an English statistician, decision theorist and leading advocate of Bayesian statistics.
David George Kendall FRS was an English statistician and mathematician, known for his work on probability, statistical shape analysis, ley lines and queueing theory. He spent most of his academic life in the University of Oxford (1946–1962) and the University of Cambridge (1962–1985). He worked with M. S. Bartlett during World War II, and visited Princeton University after the war.
Sir Bernard Walter Silverman, is a British statistician and Anglican clergyman. He was Master of St Peter's College, Oxford from 1 October 2003 to 31 December 2009. He is a member of the Statistics Department at Oxford University, and is also attached to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. He has been a member of the Council of Oxford University and of the Council of the Royal Society. He was briefly President of the Royal Statistical Society in January 2010, a position from which he stood down upon announcement of his appointment as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Home Office. He was awarded a Knighthood in the 2018 New Years Honours List, "For public service and services to Science".
Francis Patrick Kelly, CBE, FRS is Professor of the Mathematics of Systems at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He served as Master of Christ's College, Cambridge from 2006 to 2016.
David John Finney, was a British statistician and Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Edinburgh. He was Director of the Agricultural Research Council's Unit of Statistics from 1954 to 1984 and a former President of the Royal Statistical Society and of the Biometric Society. He was a pioneer in the development of systematic monitoring of drugs for detection of adverse reactions. He turned 100 in January 2017 and died on 12 November 2018 at the age of 101 following a short illness.
David Williams FRS is a Welsh mathematician who works in probability theory.
David George Clayton, is a British statistician and epidemiologist. He is titular Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Principal Research Fellow in the Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory, where he chairs the statistics group. Clayton is an ISI highly cited researcher placing him in the top 250 most cited scientists in the mathematics world over the last 20 years.
Stephen Peter "Steve" Brooks is Executive Director of Select Statistical Services Ltd, a statistical research consultancy company based in Exeter, and former professor of statistics at the Statistical Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.
Geoffrey Richard Grimmett is a mathematician known for his work on the mathematics of random systems arising in probability theory and statistical mechanics, especially percolation theory and the contact process. He is the Professor of Mathematical Statistics in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and was the Master of Downing College, Cambridge from 2013-2018.
Martin Thomas Barlow FRS FRSC is a British mathematician who is professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia in Canada since 1992.
Bhagavatula Lakshmi Surya Prakasa Rao is an Indian statistician. He was born on 6 October 1942 in Porumamilla, Andhra Pradesh. He completed his B.A. (Honours) course in Mathematics from Andhra University in 1960 and moved to the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, where he completed his M.Stat in Statistics in 1962. He graduated with a Ph.D in Statistics in 1966 from Michigan State University under Herman Rubin. He won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in Mathematical Science in 1982 and the Outstanding Alumni award from Michigan State University in 1996. He is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1983), Indian National Science Academy (1984), Indian Academy of Sciences (1992), and National Academy of Sciences (1993).
David Vere-Jones is a New Zealand statistician and probabilist. He is known in particular for his work on earthquake forecasting.