Cedric Smith (statistician)

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For other persons of the same name, see Cedric Smith (disambiguation).

Cedric Austen Bardell Smith (5 February 1917 – 10 January 2002) was a British

Mathematical Tripos, with a First in Part II in 1937 and a Distinction in Part III in 1938. Following graduation he began postgraduate research, taking his PhD
in 1942.

Work on combinatorics

While a student at Cambridge, Smith became close friends with three other students at Trinity College,

squared square
, a square that is divided into a number of smaller squares, no two of which are the same size. Publications under the name of 'Blanche Descartes' or 'F. de Carteblanche' continued to appear into the 1980s. The group also published more mainstream articles under their own names, the final one being R.L. Brooks, C.A.B. Smith, A.H. Stone and W.T. Tutte, 'Determinants and current flows in electric networks', Discrete Math., Vol. 100 (1992).

World War II

During

Society of Friends, he was a member of the Quaker Peace Studies Trust which established the chair of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford
. Smith was also a founder member (and Chairman) of the Conflict Research Society.

Post-war career

In 1946 he was appointed Assistant Lecturer at the

EM Algorithm, over 20 years before its introduction by Dempster, Laird and Rubin. He gave a more general discussion of the gene-counting method and its statistical properties in 1957.[3]

Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1945. He was a member of the Genetical Society (serving as Treasurer), the International Biometric Society (British Region), serving as President 1971–1972, and the International Statistical Institute.

Other interests

He was a member of the advisory committee to the Anti-Concorde Project.

Family

In 1957 he married Piroska Vermes (1921–2000), known as 'Piri'. They had one son, who survived them.[4] Piri's father, Dr. Paul Vermes (1897–1968), was a Hungarian refugee who became a professional mathematician at the age of 50.

See also

References

  1. ^ "Former Members". University College London. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
  2. S2CID 38625779
    .
  3. S2CID 84484349
    .
  4. ^ "Cedric Smith" (obituary), The Times, 21 February 2002.

External links

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