Arthur P. Dempster


Arthur Pentland Dempster is a Professor Emeritus in the Harvard University Department of Statistics. He was one of four faculty when the department was founded in 1957.

Biography

Dempster received his B.A. in mathematics and physics and M.A. in mathematics, 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 algorithm.

Selected publications

Dempster was a Putnam Fellow in 1951. He was elected to ASA Fellow in 1964, IMS Fellow in 1963, and AAAS Fellow in 1997.