John Aitchison

John Aitchison (22 July 1926 – 23 December 2016) was a Scottish statistician known for his pioneering work in the analysis of compositional data. During his time at Glasgow, he wrote The Lognormal Distribution, With Special Reference to its Uses in Economics with J A C Brown (who he met at Cambridge).

In 1986 he published the book The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data, an important resource on the analysis of compositional data.

On his retirement from the University of Hong Kong in 1989, he joined the University of Virginia as Professor and Chairman of the Division of Statistics, which he retired from in 1994. After this, he returned to the University of Glasgow as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics. He dedicated one of his books on compositional data to his wife, writing ‘to M, the constant among variables.’ Seven years later, he received the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society for his paper "The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data (with Discussion) (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 1982)".

In 1995 he received the William Christian Krumbein Medal of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences for his work on statistical tools which were used within the field.

Books authored The Lognormal Distribution, With Special Reference to its Uses in Economics, Aitchison, J. and Brown, J.A.C. (1957) Solving Problems in Statistics, Volume 1 (1968) Choice Against Chance: An Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory (1970) Solving Problems in Statistics, Volume 2 (1972) Statistical Prediction Analysis, Aitchison, J. and Dunsmore, I.R. (1975) The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data, Aitchison, J. (1986) Statistical Concepts and Applications in Clinical Medicine, Aitchison, J., Kay J.W., and Lawde, I.J. (2004)