Erich Leo Lehmann

Erich Leo Lehmann (20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009) was a German-born American statistician, who made a major contribution to nonparametric hypothesis testing. He is one of the eponyms of the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and of the Hodges–Lehmann estimator.

Early life Lehmann was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine in 1917 to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. He grew up in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, until the Machtergreifung in 1933, when his family fled to Switzerland to escape the Nazis.

Career Lehmann obtained his MA in mathematics in 1942 and his PhD (under Jerzy Neyman) in 1946, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1942.

In 1997, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, the department of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley created the Erich Lehmann Fund in Statistics to support the students of the department.

Selected publications

Books Testing Statistical Hypotheses, 1959 Basic Concepts of Probability and Statistics, 1964, co-author J. L. Hodges Elements of Finite Probability, 1965, co-author J. L. Hodges

Theory of Point Estimation, 1983

Reminiscences of a Statistician, 2007, Fisher, Neyman, and the Creation of Classical Statistics, 2011, [published posthumously]

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