Peter Armitage

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

(born 15 June 1924) is a

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

specialising in

medical statistics Medical statistics deals with applications of statistics to medicine and the health sciences, including epidemiology, public health, forensic medicine, and clinical research. Medical statistics has been a recognized branch of statistics in the U ...

. Peter Armitage attended Huddersfield College and went on to read mathematics at

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge ...

. Armitage belonged to the generation of mathematicians who came to maturity in the Second World War. He joined the weapons procurement agency, the

Ministry of Supply The Ministry of Supply (MoS) was a department of the UK government formed in 1939 to co-ordinate the supply of equipment to all three British armed forces, headed by the Minister of Supply. A separate ministry, however, was responsible for aircr ...

where he worked on statistical problems with George Barnard. After the war he resumed his studies and then worked as a statistician for the Medical Research Council from 1947 to 1961. From 1961 to 1976, he was Professor of Medical Statistics at the

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is a public research university in Bloomsbury, central London, and a member institution of the University of London that specialises in public health and tropical medicine. The inst ...

where he succeeded

Austin Bradford Hill Sir Austin Bradford Hill (8 July 1897 – 18 April 1991) was an English epidemiologist and statistician, pioneered the randomised clinical trial and, together with Richard Doll, demonstrated the connection between cigarette smoking and lung ...

. His main work there was on

sequential analysis In statistics, sequential analysis or sequential hypothesis testing is statistical analysis where the sample size is not fixed in advance. Instead data are evaluated as they are collected, and further sampling is stopped in accordance with a pre- ...

. He moved to Oxford as Professor of Biomathematics and became Professor of Applied Statistics and head of the new Department of Statistics, retiring in 1990. He was president of the

Royal Statistical Society The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is an established statistical society. It has three main roles: a British learned society for statistics, a professional body for statisticians and a charity which promotes statistics for the public good. ...

in 1982–4. He was president of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics in 1990–1991. He is editor-in-chief of the ''Encyclopedia of Biostatistics''. He lives in

Wallingford, Oxfordshire Wallingford () is a historic market town and civil parish located between Oxford and Reading on the River Thames in England. Although belonging to the historic county of Berkshire, it is within the ceremonial county of Oxfordshire for adminis ...

References

* Basic career information is in the entry in ** ''Who's Who 2005'' * There are recollections in ** Peter Armitage " /dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2004.00064.x Purposes, methods, philosophies, ''Significance'' Volume 1 Issue 4 Page 170 - December 2004

External links

A brief biography at wiley.co.uk (publisher of the Encyclopedia of Biostatics)
* There is a photograph at the
Peter Armitage
on th

page Academics of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Commanders of the Order of the British Empire English statisticians Fellows of St Peter's College, Oxford Living people People educated at Huddersfield New College Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society 1924 births {{UK-mathematician-stub