Willem van Zwet

Willem Rutger van Zwet (31 March 1934 – 2 July 2020) was a Dutch mathematical statistician. He was a professor at Leiden University between 1968 and 1999.

Education and career Van Zwet was born on 31 March 1934 in Leiden. Van Zwet obtained his doctoral degree in 1964 under the supervision of Jan Hemelrijk at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis titled "Convex Transformations of Random Variables". After that, he worked at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, and became a lector of statistics at Leiden University in 1964 and was named professor in 1968. He retired in 1999. He received the Humboldt Prize in 2006. He won the Adolphe Quetelet Medal in 1993, and had been a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society since 1978. In 1979, he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1996, he was made Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and was named Doctoris Honoris causa of Charles University the following year. He died on 2 July 2020 in Oegstgeest.