Cedric Smith (statistician)

Cedric Austen Bardell Smith ( born February 5, 1917 in Leicester, † 10 January 2002) was a British mathematician and mathematical statisticians.

Smith studied at the University of Cambridge ( Trinity College) with the completion in 1938 and then a doctorate. During the Second World War he worked as a Quaker ( he in 1937 joined the Quakers in ) at a hospital. From 1946 he was at the Galton Laboratory at University College London, where he became a Lecturer in 1948, Reader in 1957 and Professor in 1964 ( Weldon Professor of Biometry ). In 1982, he was officially retired, but was more scientifically active.

He dealt with applications of statistics in biology, especially genetics. At first he published with JBS Haldane in this area (probability of kinship ). He also dealt with combinatorics (graph theory ), application of mathematics to peace issues, game theory, phonetics, fingerprints, elliptic functions.

With his fellow students from Trinity College William Thomas Tutte, R. Leonard Brooks (1916-1993) and Arthur Harold Stone (1916-2000), he published under the pseudonym Blanche Descartes. All four broke in 1940, the problem of the quadrature of the square ( a square division into smaller squares).

Smith published in 1947 a solution of the problem of counterfeit coin ( this figure by minimum number of mutual weighing with a beam balance of 12 coins) and the general solution as Blanche Descartes.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and the ISI. He was co-editor of the Annals of Human Genetics.

He was married to the Hungarian Piroska Vermes ( daughter of the mathematician Paul Vermes ) and had a son with her.

Writings

• Biomathematics: hey principles of mathematics for students of biological science, 3rd edition, New York: Hafner, 1954 ( originally by William Moses Feldman ( 1879-1939 ) )