David George Kendall

David George Kendall ( born January 15, 1918 in Ripon, Yorkshire, England; † October 23, 2007 in Cambridge ) was one of the leading authorities in the field of applied probability and data analysis. Developed by him Kendall notation for describing response systems was known.

Life and work

Kendall studied at Oxford University (Queen 's College ), where in 1943 he received his master's degree. His goal was originally to be an astrophysicist ( which he published in the Journal of Astrophysics in 1938 for a job and where he also received a scholarship ), but he quickly fell into the pure mathematics of hard analysis, which he at Hardy -student heard U.S. Haslam -Jones and Edward Charles Titchmarsh. During World War II he worked in a group to rocket research in Wales ( Aberforth ) under William Cook and later Louis Rose Head. There also worked Robert Alexander Rankin, and Kendall came over the also acting there Maurice Bartlett ( and Frank Anscombe ) in contact with statistics. In 1946 he became a Fellow of Magdalen College and Lecturer at the University of Oxford. 1952/53, he was at Princeton University, where he had contacts mainly to William Feller ( and John W. Tukey ), but in the U.S. also Joseph L. Doob, Mark Kac and Kai Lai Chung met. In 1962 he became Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Churchill College there. Until 1973, when he handed over to his successor Peter Whittle, he was Director of the Statistical Laboratory in Cambridge. From 1985 he was Professor Emeritus and Emeritus Fellow from 1989 Magdalen College.

It dealt among other things with queuing theory (which he early 1950s with discrete Markov chains treated ), stochastic processes and stochastic geometry and various applications such as statistics of epidemics, Entkommwahrscheinlichkeit of comets from the solar system, applications of statistics in archeology ( which he examined, among other things, the data of Flinders Petrie over the dating of layers in Egypt on the type of shard finds), data analysis of registry office registers, Theory of earth dams, population growth. With Harry Reuter he examined in the 1950s Markov processes in continuous time with an infinite number of possible values ​​of the variables, treated on the theory of semigroups of operators, which he and Reuter showed the applicability limits of Kolmogorow'schen differential equations for these processes and access Kolmogorov, Doob and others and the semigroups of operators by Kosaku Yosida and Einar Hille annäherten. In 1954 he gave a lecture on the ICM in Amsterdam ( with Reuter: Some pathological Markov processes with a denumerable infinity of states and the associated semi- groups of operators on I). Kendall was a close friend of Jerzy Neyman.

Kendall was a member ( "Fellow" ) elected to the Royal Society in 1964, the 1976, the Sylvester Medal awarded him from 1967 to 1969 and 1982/1983 he was in their advice. The Royal Statistical Society awarded him for his work in 1981 with the Guy Medal in gold, after he had already in 1955, the Guy Medal in Silver received. In 1980 he was awarded the Wilks Award of Princeton University. 1972 to 1974 he was President of the London Mathematical Society, the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1980 he and the De Morgan Medal he received in 1989. In 1975, he was President of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistical and Probability. In 1982 he was chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences (1992) and several honorary doctorates.

Kendall was married since 1952 with Diana Fletcher, with whom he had six children, including the probability theorist Wilfrid Kendall.

He should not be confused with the British statistician Maurice George Kendall.

Writings

  • Publisher with FR Hodson, P. Tautu: Mathematics in the Archaeological and Historical Sciences, Mamaia 1970, Edinburgh University Press, 1971 ( with his contribution: Seriation from abundance matrices )
  • Editor with E. F. Harding: Stochastic Analysis, Wiley, 1973 ( with his contribution: An introduction to stochastic analysis, p.3 -43 )
  • Publisher with EF Harding: Stochastic Geometry, Wiley 1974
  • With D. Barden, TKCarne, H.Le: Shape and Shape Theory, Wiley 1999
  • Some problems and methods in statistical archeology, World Archaeology Vol.1, 1969, p.68 -76
  • Some problems in the theory of comets, as well as The distribution of energy perturbations for Halley 's and someother comets, Jerzy Neyman in (Eds. ), Proceedings of the 4th Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical and Statistica Probability, 1961
  • Stochastic processes occuring in the theory of queues and Their analysis by the method of the imbedded Markov chain, Annals Math.Statistics Bd.24, 1953, p.338 -354
  • Some problems in the theory of queues, J.Royal Statistical Society B, Bd.13, 1951, p.151 -173
Kendall's notation G. H. Hardy Chung Kai-lai Queue area Maurice Kendall John Kingman Edward Arthur Milne Ernst Reuter Integrated Authority File
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