John Kingman

Education and early life The grandson of a coal miner and son of a government scientist with a PhD in chemistry, Kingman was born in Beckenham, Kent, and grew up in the outskirts of London, where he attended Christ's College, Finchley, which was then a state grammar school. He was awarded a scholarship to read mathematics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1956. On graduating in 1960, he began work on his PhD under the supervision of Peter Whittle, studying queueing theory, Markov chains and regenerative phenomena.

Career and research Whittle left Cambridge for the University of Manchester, and, rather than follow him there, Kingman moved instead to the University of Oxford, where he resumed his work under David Kendall. After another year, Kendall was appointed a professor at Cambridge and so Kingman returned to Cambridge. He returned, however, as a member of the teaching staff (and a Fellow of Pembroke College) and never completed his PhD. a backwards-in-time theory of individuals in historical populations that, because it greatly simplifies computation, underlies much of modern population genomics.

From October 1985, Kingman was elected Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol. at a time when most academics received pay-rises of about 3%. Whilst at Bristol, he also served in a number of other capacities. In the academic field, he was president of the Royal Statistical Society from 1987 to 1989, and president of the London Mathematical Society from 1990 to 1992. In public service, he was a member of the board of the British Council between 1986 and 1991 and was on the Board of the British Technology Group from 1986 until after it was privatised in 1992. In 2000 the Chancellor of the Exchequer appointed Sir John the first chairman of the Statistics Commission, the body that oversees the work of the Office for National Statistics, the UK government's statistics agency. In 2002 Kingman attracted some media attention by telling the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee that the 2011 UK Census could be conducted using new technology rather than the traditional headcount, or even not conducted at all.

Honors and awards In 1985 Kingman was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his work with the Science and Engineering Research Council. Kingman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1971, later receiving its Royal Medal in 1983 "n recognition of his distinguished researches on queuing theory, on regenerative phenomena, and on mathematical genetics". He was also awarded the Guy Medal in silver by the Royal Statistical Society in 1981.