Edwin James George Pitman (29 October 1897 – 21 July 1993) was an Australian mathematician who made significant contributions to statistics and probability theory. In particular, he is remembered primarily as the originator of the Pitman permutation test, Pitman nearness and Pitman efficiency. His work the Pitman measure of closeness or Pitman nearness concerning the exponential families of probability distributions has been studied extensively since the 1980s by C. R. Rao, Pranab K. Sen, and others. The Pitman–Koopman–Darmois theorem states that only exponential families of probability distributions admit a sufficient statistic whose dimension remains bounded as the sample size grows.

Biography

Pitman was born in Melbourne on 29 October 1897, and attended University of Melbourne, residing at Ormond College, where he graduated with First Class Honours. In 1926 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Tasmania, which he held until his retirement in 1962. He was a founding member and second President of the Australian Mathematical Society. He was also active within the Statistical Society of Australia, which in 1978 named the Pitman medal in his honour.

Terminology

However, neither of these terms caught on.

Pitman's published work (selected)

Autobiography

Pitman contributed a chapter, "Reminiscences of a mathematician who strayed into statistics", to the volume

Family

He had four children, including Jim Pitman, a Professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley.