Herman Chernoff


Herman Chernoff is an American applied mathematician, statistician and physicist formerly a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana, Stanford, and MIT, currently working at Harvard University.

Early life and education

Herman Chernoff's parents were Pauline and Max Chernoff, Jewish immigrants from Russia. He studied at Townsend Harris High School and earned a B.S. in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1943. He attended graduate school at Brown University, earning an M.Sc. in applied mathematics in 1945, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1948 under the supervision of Abraham Wald.

Recognition

Chernoff became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980,. In 1987 he was selected for the Wilks Memorial Award by the American Statistical Association, and in 2012 he was made an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society.