John Wishart (statistician)

For other people named John Wishart, see John Wishart (disambiguation).

John Wishart
Born	(1898-11-28)28 November 1898 Perth, Scotland
Died	14 July 1956(1956-07-14) (aged 57) Acapulco, Mexico
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Nationality	Scottish
Institutions	Rothamsted Experimental Station University of Cambridge
Alma mater	Edinburgh University Cambridge University University College London
Doctoral advisor	Karl Pearson
Doctoral students	M. S. Bartlett

John Wishart FRSE (28 November 1898 – 14 July 1956) was a Scottish mathematician and agricultural statistician.

He worked successively at University College London with Karl Pearson, at Rothamsted Experimental Station with Ronald Fisher, and then as a leader in statistics in the University of Cambridge where he became the first Director of the Statistical Laboratory in 1953. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1931, and edited Biometrika from 1937. The Wishart distribution is named after him.

Wishart died at age 57 in a bathing accident in Acapulco while representing the Food and Agriculture Organization on a mission to set up a research centre.

References

• Whittle, P. "The Cambridge Statistical Laboratory up to 1993 (revised 2002)".
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "John Wishart", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
• Times Obituary
• Pearson, E. S. (1957). "John Wishart 1898–1956". Biometrika. 44: 1. doi:10.1093/biomet/44.1-2.1.