Herbert Aron David

Herbert Aron David (December 19, 1925 — July 14, 2014) was a German-born American mathematical statistician. He was distinguished professor emeritus of statistics at Iowa State University. He was a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

Early life and education David was born in Berlin, Germany in 1925. After the pogrom against Jews on Kristallnacht, his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and emigrated to Australia, where he continued his high school education. He earned his BS in mathematics in 1947 from Sydney University, and his PhD in statistics in 1953 University College London. His PhD thesis, Theory and Applications of Standard and Shortcut Tests in Analysis of Variance, was written under the tutelage of Herman Otto Hartley.

Career After completing his PhD, David returned to Australia and worked at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) for two years, after which he joined the statistics department at Melbourne University as a senior lecturer. In 1957 David moved to the United States, and became professor of statistics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute until 1964 when he took a similar position at the University of North Carolina. In 1972 he joined Iowa State University as director of the statistics laboratory and chair of the department of statistics. He was professor of statistics until being named distinguished professor in 1980. In 1996, he retired and was awarded emeritus status.

David was author or co-author of over 100 publications. Two of his books, The Method of Paired Comparisons and Order Statistics, received positive reviews and are acknowledged to be the first comprehensive treatises of their subject matter and are considered classic texts. Later in his career, he became interested in and published on the history of statistics and origins of statistical terminology.

David was involved in service to his profession. He served as associate editor of Biometrics and of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. He was president of the Eastern North American Regions of the International Biometric Society and served on a number of committees for both the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association.

David was an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and was an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

Selected publications

Books

Book chapters

Journal articles