John Aitchison is a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

statistician. He studied at the Universities of Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

 and Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

. From 1966 to 1976 he was Titular Professor of Statistics

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

, and Mitchell Lecturer in Statistics at the University of Glasgow

University of Glasgow

The University of Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Located in Glasgow, the university was founded in 1451 and is presently one of seventeen British higher education institutions ranked amongst the top 100 of the...

. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

Royal Society of Edinburgh

The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity, operating on a wholly independent and non-party-political basis and providing public benefit throughout Scotland...

 in 1968. In 1976 he joined the University of Hong Kong as the founding Professor of Statistics.

In 1986 he published the book, The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data, the key reference to date on the analysis of compositional data

Compositional data

In statistics, compositional data are quantitative descriptions of the parts of some whole, conveying exclusively relative information.This definition, given by John Aitchison has several consequences:...

.

In 1988, he received the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society

Royal Statistical Society

The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...

 for the 'paper on "The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data”, which he read to the Society on 13 January 1982 (JRSS B 44 139-177) and for influential contributions to distribution theory

Distribution (mathematics)

In mathematical analysis, distributions are objects that generalize functions. Distributions make it possible to differentiate functions whose derivatives do not exist in the classical sense. In particular, any locally integrable function has a distributional derivative...

, practical Bayesian statistics

Bayesian statistics

Bayesian statistics is that subset of the entire field of statistics in which the evidence about the true state of the world is expressed in terms of degrees of belief or, more specifically, Bayesian probabilities...

, statistical diagnosis in medicine and many other areas of applied and theoretical statistics.'

On his retirement from the University of Hong Kong in 1989, John joined the University of Virginia

University of Virginia

The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...

 as Professor and Chairman of Division of Statistics. In 1995 he received the William C. Krumbein

William C. Krumbein

William Christian Krumbein was a notable geologist, after whom the Krumbein Medal of the International Association for Mathematical Geology was named. This medal was established at the 25th International Geological Congress in Sydney, in 1976...

 Medal of the International Association for Mathematical Geology for a 'distinguished career as author and researcher in the field of mathematical geology.'

Other influential books he wrote include

• The Lognormal Distribution, Aitchison, J. and Brown, J.A.C. (1957)
• Statistical Prediction Analysis, Aitchison, J. and Dunsmore, I.R. (1975)

both published by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...

.

External links

• Photograph of John Aitchison on the Portraits of Statisticians page.
• William Christian Krumbein Medal