Arthur P. Dempster

Arthur Pentland Dempster (born 1929) is a Professor Emeritus in the Harvard University Department of Statistics. He was one of four faculty when the department was founded in 1957.[3]

Arthur P. Dempster
Dempster at a workshop in Brest, France, 2010
Born1929 (age 93–94)
Alma materPrinceton University (PhD 1956)
University of Toronto (BA 1952; MA 1953)
Known forDempster–Shafer theory,
EM algorithm
AwardsPutnam Fellow (1951)
ASA Fellow (1964) [1]
IMS Fellow (1963) [2]
Guggenheim Fellow
AAAS Fellow (1997)
Scientific career
FieldsStatistics
InstitutionsHarvard University
ThesisThe two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case (1956)
Doctoral advisorJohn Tukey
Doctoral studentsAugustine Kong
Nan Laird

Biography

Dempster received his B.A. in mathematics and physics (1952) and M.A. in mathematics (1953), both from the University of Toronto. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton University in 1956. His thesis, titled The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case, was written under the supervision of John Tukey.

Academic works

Among his contributions to statistics are the Dempster–Shafer theory and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm.

Selected publications
  • Dempster, A. P. (1967), "Upper and lower probabilities induced by a multivalued mapping", The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 38 (2): 325–339, doi:10.1214/aoms/1177698950
  • Dempster, A. P.; Laird, N.; Rubin, D. B. (1977), "Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 39 (1): 1–38, JSTOR 2984875

Honors and awards

Dempster was a Putnam Fellow in 1951.[4] He was elected as an American Statistical Association Fellow in 1964,[1] an Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow in 1963,[2] and an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow in 1997.[5]

References
  1. "Search Fellows of the ASA". amstat.org. ASA. Archived from the original on 16 June 2016. Retrieved 3 February 2015. click submit and search "Dempster"
  2. "Honored IMS Fellows". Archived from the original on 2016-10-19. Retrieved 2015-02-03.
  3. Date information sourced from Library of Congress Authorities data, via corresponding WorldCat Identities linked authority file (LAF).
  4. "Putnam Competition Individual and Team Winners". Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved December 10, 2021.
  5. "List of Members by Classes September 1, 1997". Records of the Academy (American Academy of Arts and Sciences) (1996/1997): 56–128. 1996. JSTOR 3786119.


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