John Kingman

Sir John Frank Charles Kingman ( born August 28, 1939 in Beckenham ) is a British mathematician who deals with statistics.

Kingman studied from 1956 Mathematics at Cambridge University (Bachelor 1960) with Peter Whittle and then at the University of Oxford with David George Kendall, where he specialized in statistics. Instead of completing the doctorate, he went with Kendall back to Cambridge, where he became a Fellow of Pembroke College. In 1965 he became Reader at the University of Sussex in 1966 and professor. 1969 to 1985 he was a professor at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of St. Anne 's College. He has been a visiting professor at the Australian National University. Kingman has inter alia, contributions to queuing theory, with applications to traffic flows, and population genetics. In 1968 he proved a subadditive ergodic theorem for stochastic processes (Journal Royal Statistical Society, 1968).

In 1967 he was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society, 1971, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Medal he received in 1983. In 1981 he was awarded the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society, 2013 gold. In 1985 he was knighted. 1978 to 1992 he was Vice President of the Institute of Statisticians and 1987-1989 of the Royal Statistical Society. 1990 to 1992 he was President of the London Mathematical Society. In 2000 he became chairman of the state-owned National Statistics Commission. He is five honorary doctorates. In 1985, he became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol.

Writings

• With SJ Taylor: Introduction to measure and probability, Cambridge University Press 1966
• On the algebra of queues, Methuen 1966
• Regenerative Phenomena, Wiley 1972
• Mathematics of Genetic Diversity, SIAM 1980
• Poisson Processes, Oxford University Press 1993