William Gemmell Cochran

William Gemmell Cochran was a prominent statistician, born in Scotland on 15 July 1909 but spending most of his life in the United States. He studied mathematics at the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge, worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1934 to 1939, and then moved to the United States, where he helped establish several departments of statistics. His longest spell at any one university was at Harvard, which he joined in 1957 and from which he retired in 1976. His books became standard texts, including Experimental Designs, written with Gertrude Mary Cox in 1950, and Sampling Techniques, and he contributed to George W. Snedecor's Statistical Methods Applied to Experiments in Agriculture and Biology from its fifth edition in 1956. He died on 29 March 1980.