Bertil Matérn

Bertil Matérn (1917 to 2007) was a Swedish statistician whose name is carried by the Matérn covariance function, a standard model in spatial statistics. He was born in Gothenburg on 18 May 1917, the son of a pharmacist, and studied at Stockholm University under the supervision of Harald Cramér. His doctoral thesis of 1960, on spatial variation and stochastic models for forest surveys and other sampling investigations, grew out of his employment at the Forestry Research Institute of Sweden, where he worked on forestry statistics. He later held a post at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. His fields were spatial statistics, forestry statistics and point processes. He died in Danderyd on 6 November 2007.