Maurice Bertram Priestley (15 March 1933 – 15 June 2013 ) was a professor of statistics in the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester, England. He gained his first degree at the University of Cambridge and went on to gain a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester. He was known especially for his work on time series analysis, especially spectral analysis and wavelet analysis. He was a longstanding editor of the Journal of Time Series Analysis, a special edition of which was published in his honour in 1993. Less well-known but equally important was his work with M.T. Chao on nonparametric function fitting.

Selected publications