John Hartigan

John Anthony Hartigan (born July 2, 1937) is an Australian-American statistician, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Statistics emeritus at Yale University. He made fundamental contributions to clustering algorithms, including the famous Hartigan-Wong method and biclustering, and Bayesian statistics.

Education and career Hartigan was born in Sydney, Australia and studied mathematics at the University of Sydney, where he obtained his BSc in 1959 and MSc in 1960. Afterwards, he moved to Princeton University, where he studied under John Tukey and Frank Anscombe. He obtained his PhD in statistics at Princeton in 1962. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1964 as an assistant professor and moved to Yale University in 1969, when he became an associate professor. He gained full professorship at Yale in 1972. He was the chair at Yale's department of statistics from 1973 to 1975 and again from 1988 to 1994.