Joseph Oscar Irwin
Joseph Oscar Irwin (17 December 1898 – 27 July 1982) was a British statistician who advanced the use of statistical methods in biological assay and other fields of
Biography
Irwin was born in London. He attended the City of London School where he specialised in classics and then at a late date in mathematics. In December 1917 he won a scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge to read mathematics. A serious illness disqualified him from war service but he spent a year computing anti-aircraft trajectories for Karl Pearson. When Irwin graduated from Cambridge in 1921 he joined Pearson's department of applied statistics which had returned to its normal activities. Irwin published his first work there, including his 1927 paper on the distribution of means.[4]
In 1928, Irwin moved to
Irwin made an important contribution to the dissemination of Fisher's ideas by writing expository pieces. In his appreciation Greenberg recalls the mathematical statisticians
From 1931 until his retirement in 1965, Irwin worked for the
At the MRC, Irwin wrote a series of important papers on bioassay. An important theoretical contribution was his 1935 paper on "Fisher's exact test". Irwin had done the work in 1933, apparently preceding the better known work of Fisher and Yates. After the war Irwin embarked on a number of long-term collaborative studies, often for official committees. These were applied studies but he continued to work on more mathematical problems, e.g. he produced a series of papers on the generalized
Irwin received many honours and served as president of the Royal Statistical Society in 1962–64; he had played an important part in the affairs of the society for many years.[1]
Greenberg has described the man[5]
J. O. Irwin was a soft spoken kind soul who took a tremendous interest in his students and their achievements.... He was a lovable absent-minded kind of professor who smoked more matches than he did tobacco in his ever-present pipe while he was deeply involved in thinking about other important matters.
Selected publications
According to Armitage, Irwin published about 120 papers.[citation needed]
- J. O. Irwin (1927) On the Frequency Distribution of the Means of Samples from a Population Having any Law of Frequency with Finite Moments, with Special Reference to Pearson's Type II, Biometrika Vol. 19, pp. 225–239.
- J. O. Irwin (1931) Recent Advances in Mathematical Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. 94, pp. 568–578
- J. O. Irwin (1935) Tests of Significance for Differences between Percentages Based on Small Numbers, Metron, Vol. 12, pp. 83–94.
- J. O. Irwin (1963) Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, 1890–1962, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, Vol. 126, pp. 159–162.
- J. O. Irwin (1975) The Generalized Waring Distribution. Part I, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), Vol. 138, pp. 18–31.
See also
References
- ^ ISSN 0035-9238.
- ^ "Irwin, Joseph Oscar - Encyclopedia of Mathematics". encyclopediaofmath.org. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
- ISBN 978-0-387-95283-3, retrieved 3 January 2024
- ISSN 0006-3444.
- ISSN 0006-341X.
External links
There is a photograph at
- Joseph Oscar Irwin on the Portraits of Statisticians page.
For Irwin's correspondence with Fisher see