Theodore Wilbur Anderson (June 5, 1918 – September 17, 2016) was an American mathematician and

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 ...

who specialized in the analysis of

multivariate data Multivariate statistics is a subdivision of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one outcome variable. Multivariate statistics concerns understanding the different aims and background of each of the dif ...

. He was born in

Minneapolis Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origins ...

, Minnesota. He was on the faculty of

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

from 1946 until moving to

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1967, becoming Emeritus Professor in 1988. He served as Editor of ''

Annals of Mathematical Statistics The ''Annals of Mathematical Statistics'' was a peer-reviewed statistics journal published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1930 to 1972. It was superseded by the ''Annals of Statistics'' and the ''Annals of Probability''. In 1938, ...

'' from 1950 to 1952. He was elected President of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

in 1962. Anderson's 1958 textbook,'' An Introduction to Multivariate Analysis'', educated a generation of theorists and applied statisticians; it was "the classic" in the area until the book by Mardia, Kent and Bibb

Anderson's book emphasizes

hypothesis testing A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data at hand sufficiently support a particular hypothesis. Hypothesis testing allows us to make probabilistic statements about population parameters. ...

via

likelihood ratio test In statistics, the likelihood-ratio test assesses the goodness of fit of two competing statistical models based on the ratio of their likelihoods, specifically one found by maximization over the entire parameter space and another found after ...

s and the properties of

power function Exponentiation is a mathematical operation, written as , involving two numbers, the '' base'' and the ''exponent'' or ''power'' , and pronounced as " (raised) to the (power of) ". When is a positive integer, exponentiation corresponds to re ...

Admissibility Admissibility may refer to: Law * Admissible evidence, evidence which may be introduced in a court of law *Admissibility (ECHR), whether a case will be considered in the European Convention on Human Rights system Mathematics and logic * Admissible ...

unbiasedness In statistics, the bias of an estimator (or bias function) is the difference between this estimator's expected value and the true value of the parameter being estimated. An estimator or decision rule with zero bias is called ''unbiased''. In stat ...

and

monotonicity In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function between ordered sets that preserves or reverses the given order. This concept first arose in calculus, and was later generalized to the more abstract setting of orde ...

. Anderson is also known for

Anderson–Darling test The Anderson–Darling test is a statistical test of whether a given sample of data is drawn from a given probability distribution. In its basic form, the test assumes that there are no parameters to be estimated in the distribution being tested, ...

of whether there is evidence that a given sample of data did not arise from a given probability distribution. He also framed the Anderson–Bahadur algorithm along with

Raghu Raj Bahadur Raghu Raj Bahadur (30 April 1924 – 7 June 1997) was an Indian statistician considered by peers to be "one of the architects of the modern theory of mathematical statistics". Biography Bahadur was born in Delhi, India, and received his BA ...

, which is used in statistics and engineering for solving binary classification problems when the underlying data have

multivariate normal distribution In probability theory and statistics, the multivariate normal distribution, multivariate Gaussian distribution, or joint normal distribution is a generalization of the one-dimensional (univariate) normal distribution to higher dimensions. One d ...

s with different covariance matrices.

Awards and honors

He was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1946. In 1949 he was elected a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

. He was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 1974. He was a member of the

Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters ( no, Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi, DNVA) is a learned society based in Oslo, Norway. Its purpose is to support the advancement of science and scholarship in Norway. History The Royal Frederick Univer ...

. Anderson died in September 2016 at the age of 98 in Stanford, California after experiencing heart problems.

Selected bibliography

Books

Chapters in books

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Anderson, Theodore 1918 births 2016 deaths Scientists from Minneapolis Columbia University faculty Stanford University Department of Statistics faculty Stanford University Department of Economics faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the Econometric Society Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Economists from Minnesota Mathematical statisticians