Arthur Pentland Dempster is a Professor Emeritus in the Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 Department of Statistics. He was one of four faculty when the department was founded in 1957.

He was a Putnam Fellow

William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to the Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students of the United States and Canada, awarding scholarships and cash prizes ranging from $250 to $2,500 for the top students and $5,000...

 in 1951. He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 1956. His thesis, titled The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case, was written under the supervision of John Tukey

John Tukey

John Wilder Tukey ForMemRS was an American statistician.- Biography :Tukey was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1915, and obtained a B.A. in 1936 and M.Sc. in 1937, in chemistry, from Brown University, before moving to Princeton University where he received a Ph.D...

.

Among his contributions to statistics are the Dempster-Shafer theory

Dempster-Shafer theory

The Dempster–Shafer theory is a mathematical theory of evidence. It allows one to combine evidence from different sources and arrive at a degree of belief that takes into account all the available evidence. The theory was first developed by Arthur P...

 and the EM algorithm

Expectation-maximization algorithm

In statistics, an expectation–maximization algorithm is an iterative method for finding maximum likelihood or maximum a posteriori estimates of parameters in statistical models, where the model depends on unobserved latent variables...

.

Publications

• A. P. Dempster, N. M. Laird and D. B. Rubin. (1977). "Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data via the EM Algorithm," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, B, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 1–38. (The authors collected a variety of maximum likelihood problems and methods of solving these problems that occurred in the literature. They found that all of these methods had some ideas in common and they named it the EM Algorithm, standing for "Expectation, Maximization".)

External links