Jerzy Neyman

Jerzy Neyman was born on 16 April 1894 in Bendery, then in the Russian Empire, and died on 5 August 1981 in Berkeley, California. A Polish mathematician and statistician, he worked in Warsaw and London before emigrating to the United States in 1938 to join the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded and directed the Statistical Laboratory and, in 1955, turned it into Berkeley's own independent Department of Statistics, one of the world's leading centers for mathematical statistics. With Egon Pearson, Karl Pearson's son, he developed a rigorous framework for testing statistical hypotheses, published in their 1933 paper On the Problem of the Most Efficient Tests of Statistical Hypotheses; in his own 1937 paper Outline of a Theory of Statistical Estimation Based on the Classical Theory of Probability he introduced the confidence interval, a range constructed from sample data expected to contain a population parameter with a stated degree of confidence. He also contributed foundational methods to survey sampling and applied statistics to agriculture, meteorology and medicine.