Person: De Forest, Erastus Lyman

Erastus De Forest was an American mathematician and statistician and an early user of Monte Carlo methods.

De Forest remained at Yale to study engineering and at this time was a fellow student with J Willard Gibbs who entered Yale in the year that De Forest was awarded his B.A. In 1856 De Forest was awarded a Ph.B. by Yale and then in February of the following year he set off with his aunt for New York to begin a journey with her to Havana.
However, before the ship was due to depart De Forest vanished leaving his luggage.
It was more than two years after he vanished that John De Forest received a letter from his son, posted in Australia.
De Forest, depressed with his privileged life, had travelled to California where he had got a job at a mine.
From his return to Connecticut in 1865 he devoted himself to the study of mathematics.
The remarkable contributions of De Forest to statistics had little or no influence on the subject since those who later developed similar ideas were totally unaware of his contributions.
De Forest was not associated with any institution so lacked the visibility that such a position would have meant.
His contributions were recognised, however, by Pearson whose attention was drawn to De Forest's papers.
Pearson acknowledged De Forest's priority in deriving the chi square distribution.
Stigler uses information on De Forest available to him from a well researched but unpublished work on De Forest by H H Wolfenden.
Shortly before he died he founded the Erastus L De Forest Professorship of Mathematics at Yale.

Born 27 June 1834, Watertown, Connecticut, USA. Died 6 June 1888, Watertown, Connecticut, USA.

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Origin Usa

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O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive