Henry Scheffé

Henry Scheffé (1907 to 1977) was an American statistician who began as a pure mathematician. Born in New York City to German immigrants, he studied mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and took his doctorate there in 1935 on differential equations under Rudolf Ernest Langer. He taught at Wisconsin, Oregon State and Reed College, then moved to Princeton in 1941, where he turned to statistics and consulted for the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development. After posts at Syracuse, UCLA and Columbia, where he chaired the statistics department, he joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1953 and retired from it in 1974. He is known for the Lehmann-Scheffé theorem and for Scheffé's method. He became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1951 and was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1954.