Jerzy Neyman Biography

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World of Mathematics on Jerzy Neyman

The founder of modern theoretical statistics, Jerzy Neyman was also an integral factor in the development of the statistical theory of hypothesis testing. His works has come to be widely applicable in the fields of medical diagnosis, astronomy, genetics, meteorology, and high-tech agriculture. Neyman is particularly remembered for combining a theory and its practical applications in his work, and for making advances in the statistical methods of confidence intervals and survey sampling.

Neyman was born Jerzy Splawa-Neyman on April 16, 1894 in Bendery, Moldavia (formerly Bessarabia, now Moldova), which then was part of Russia. He began classes at the Ukraine's Kharkov State University in 1912, ultimately receiving a master's degree from the school in 1916 for his work on Lebesgue integers. The following year, the Institute of Technology in Kharkov hired him as a lecturer.

Neyman worked at the Institute until 1921, when he accepted a post as statistician at the Institute of Agriculture in Bydgoszcz, Poland. After two years there, he moved again, this time to Warsaw, Poland to work as a lecturer in mathematics and statistics at the College of Agriculture. It was there that he received his PhD in 1924. After attending lectures on a fellowship during 1925-1927 by Jacques Hadamard and Henri Lebesgue in Paris and London, Neyman returned to Warsaw and renewed his interest in statistics.

As soon as he got back to Poland, Neyman launched an effort to establish a biometrics (or biostatistics) laboratory in Warsaw. It took him a year, but by 1928, he had succeeded in creating the lab at the Nencki Institute for Experimental Biology. He joined the University of Warsaw faculty in 1928, when he also began collaborating with E.S. Pearson on such influential papers as "On the problem of the most efficient tests of statistical hypotheses" (1933) and "The testing of statistical hypotheses in relation to probabilities a priori" (1933). Meanwhile, however, Neyman was having an increasingly difficult time keeping his laboratory open and his researchers busy because of the Polish government's inefficiency and general political upheaval in the region. By 1932, he complained, "I simply cannot work, the crisis and the struggle for existence takes all my time and energy."

In 1934, Neyman went to the University of London to fill a temporary post as special lecturer in statistics, but when the job became permanent the following year, he stayed on. Neyman remained on the University of London staff until 1938, when he emigrated to the United States. He found work at the University of California at Berkeley as a mathematics professor, but by 1941 he had created and been made director of a new statistical laboratory, as well as professor of statistics. Neyman would soon make the lab one of the world's top centers for the study and application of mathematical statistics. He also oversaw a series of lectures on probability and statistics that drew participants from all over the world.

During World War II, the U.S. Navy made good use of Neyman's statistical expertise, putting him to work on the National Defense Research Committee Project from 1942 to 1945. After the war, he spent 1946 as a visiting professor at New York's Columbia University, but aside from that brief foray, he remained at UC Berkeley. In 1955, he became chairperson of the school's new Department of Statistics and from 1958 to 1959 he was resident professor at UC's Miller Institute of Basic Research Science. In 1968 Neyman received the National Medal of Science.

Neyman remained at UC Berkeley until his death on August 5, 1981 in Oakland, California. He had married in 1920 and had one child.