Wilfrid Dixon

Wilfrid Joseph Dixon (December 13, 1915 – September 20, 2008) was an American mathematician and statistician. He made notable contributions to nonparametric statistics.

Wilfrid Dixon
Born	(1915-12-13)December 13, 1915 Portland, Oregon
Died	September 20, 2008(2008-09-20) (aged 92)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Princeton University University of Wisconsin–Madison
Known for	BMDP
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematical statistics
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles University of Oregon
Doctoral advisor	Samuel S. Wilks

A native of Portland, Oregon, Dixon received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oregon State College in 1938. He continued his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he earned a master's degree in 1939. Under supervision of Samuel S. Wilks, he then earned a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton in 1944.[1]

Dixon was on the faculties at Oklahoma (1942–1943), Oregon (1946–1955), and UCLA (1955–1986, then emeritus). During World War II, he was an operations analyst on Guam. In the 1960s at UCLA, Dixon developed BMDP, a statistical software package for biomedical analyses.[2]

In 1955 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[3] His daughter, Janet D. Elashoff, also became a UCLA faculty member, and a fellow in 1978.[4] In December 2008 she funded the W. J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting of the American Statistical Association in his honor.[5]

References

1. "Wilfrid J. Dixon *44". Princeton Alumni Weekly. September 23, 2009.
2. "Oral History of Wilfrid J. (Wil) Dixon and Linda Glassner: Interviewed by Luanne Johnson" (PDF). March 27, 1986.
3. View/Search Fellows of the ASA, accessed 2016-07-23.
4. ASA Fellows, Caucus for Women in Statistics, retrieved 2017-10-24
5. W. J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting, American Statistical Association, retrieved 2017-10-24

External links

• Wilfrid Dixon at the Mathematics Genealogy Project