Jerzy Neyman

Jerzy Neyman (April 16, 1894 – August 5, 1981; born Jerzy Spława-Neyman; Polish: [ˈjɛʐɨ ˈspwava ˈnɛjman]) was a Polish mathematician and statistician who spent the first part of his professional career at various institutions in Warsaw, Poland and then at University College London, and the second part at the University of California, Berkeley. Neyman first introduced the modern concept of a confidence interval into statistical hypothesis testing[2] and co-revised Ronald Fisher's null hypothesis testing (in collaboration with Egon Pearson).

Jerzy Neyman
Born
Jerzy Spława-Neyman

(1894-04-16)April 16, 1894
Bendery, Bessarabia Governorate, Russian Empire (now Bender, Moldova)
DiedAugust 5, 1981(1981-08-05) (aged 87)
Oakland, California, US
NationalityPolish
Alma materUniversity of Warsaw
Kharkov University
Known forConfidence interval
Hypothesis testing
Neyman-Pearson lemma
Statistics of galaxy clusters
AwardsNewcomb Cleveland Prize (1958)
Guy Medal (Gold, 1966)
National Medal of Science (1968)
Fellow of the Royal Society[1]
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsNencki Institute of Experimental Biology
University College London
University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisorWacław Sierpiński
Doctoral studentsGeorge Dantzig
Lucien Le Cam
Evelyn Fix
Erich Leo Lehmann
Joseph Hodges

Life and career

He was born into a Polish family in Bendery, in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire, the fourth of four children of Czesław Spława-Neyman and Kazimiera Lutosławska. His family was Roman Catholic and Neyman served as an altar boy during his early childhood. Later, Neyman would become an agnostic. Neyman's family descended from a long line of Polish nobles and military heroes. He graduated from the Kamieniec Podolski gubernial gymnasium for boys in 1909 under the name Yuri Cheslavovich Neyman.[3] He began studies at Kharkov University in 1912, where he was taught by Ukrainian probabilist Sergei Natanovich Bernstein. After he read 'Lessons on the integration and the research of the primitive functions' by Henri Lebesgue, he was fascinated with measure and integration.

In 1921 he returned to Poland in a program of repatriation of POWs after the Polish-Soviet War. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree at University of Warsaw in 1924 for a dissertation titled "On the Applications of the Theory of Probability to Agricultural Experiments". He was examined by Wacław Sierpiński and Stefan Mazurkiewicz, among others. He spent a couple of years in London and Paris on a fellowship to study statistics with Karl Pearson and Émile Borel. After his return to Poland he established the Biometric Laboratory at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw.

He published many books dealing with experiments and statistics, and devised the way which the FDA tests medicines today.

Neyman proposed and studied randomized experiments in 1923.[4] Furthermore, his paper "On the Two Different Aspects of the Representative Method: The Method of Stratified Sampling and the Method of Purposive Selection", given at the Royal Statistical Society on 19 June 1934,[5] was the groundbreaking event leading to modern scientific sampling. He introduced the confidence interval in his paper in 1937.[6] Another noted contribution is the Neyman–Pearson lemma, the basis of hypothesis testing.

He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1928 in Bologna[7] and a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1954 in Amsterdam.[8]

In 1938 he moved to Berkeley, where he worked for the rest of his life. Thirty-nine students received their Ph.D's under his advisorship. In 1966 he was awarded the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society and three years later the U.S.'s National Medal of Science. He died in Oakland, California in 1981.

See also

References

Citations
  1. Kendall, D. G.; Bartlett, M. S.; Page, T. L. (1982). "Jerzy Neyman. 16 April 1894-5 August 1981". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 28: 379–412. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1982.0015. JSTOR 769904.
  2. Salsburg, David (2002). The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. Macmillan. p. 122. ISBN 9780805071344.
  3. Выпускники Каменец-Подольской гимназии 1883-1920
  4. Neyman, Jerzy. 1923 [1990]. “On the Application of Probability Theory to Agricultural Experiments. Essay on Principles. Section 9.” Statistical Science 5 (4): 465–472. Trans. Dorota M. Dabrowska and Terence P. Speed.
  5. Neyman, J.(1934) "On the two different aspects of the representative method: The method of stratified sampling and the method of purposive selection", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 97 (4), 557–625 JSTOR 2342192
  6. Neyman, Jerzy (1937). "Outline of a Theory of Statistical Estimation Based on the Classical Theory of Probability". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. 236 (767): 333–380. doi:10.1098/rsta.1937.0005. JSTOR 91337.
  7. Neyman, J. "On methods of testing hypotheses". In: Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici: Bologna del 3 al 10 de settembre di 1928. vol. 6. pp. 35–42.
  8. Neyman, J. (1954). "Probabilistic theory of clustering of galaxies with particular reference to the hypothesis of an expanding universe". In: Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians: Amsterdam, 1954. vol. 2. pp. 298–299.

Sources
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