Person: Kiefer (2), Jack Carl
Jack Kiefer was an American mathematical statistician who worked in the optimal design of experiments and other topics in mathematical statistics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- After a break of three years he returned to MIT in the spring of 1946 but it was not clear at this stage in which area Kiefer wanted to make a career.
- The theatre was one of Kiefer's passions and he had the opportunity at MIT to become involved in writing, directing and producing plays.
- By the way, Jack was really torn between show biz and statistics.
- After graduating Kiefer attended a summer school at Berkeley where courses of lectures were given by Michel Loève and Abraham Wald.
- Kiefer moved to Cornell as an instructor in the Department of Mathematics and continued working for his doctorate with Wolfowitz.
- After Kiefer was awarded his doctorate in 1952 he was promoted at Cornell from an instructor to as assistant professor.
- Jack aspired at one time to become a proficient pianist.
- In July 1973 Kiefer was elected the first Horace White Professor at Cornell University, a position he held until 1979 when he retired and joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.
- Kiefer's main research area was the optimal design of experiments, and about half his 100 publications dealt with that topic.
- A paper Sequential minimax search for a maximum which Kiefer published in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society in 1953 was based on his master's thesis.
- Let us note a few other examples of Kiefer's work.
- In this paper Kiefer generalised the notions of a balanced incomplete block design and a Youden square, to the balanced block design and generalized Youden square.
- Another important paper Optimum designs in regression problems, which Kiefer wrote in collaboration with Wolfowitz, appeared in 1959.
- In 1980 Kiefer went to China as part of Berkeley's China Exchange Program.
- Kiefer received many honours.
- Jack was unbelievably humble, especially for a man of his stature.
- Jack was very critical.
- Kiefer's suffered for many years from an arthritic hip condition which by 1971 saw him severely disabled.
- Jack's friends at Cornell felt similarly.
- In 1987, six years after his death, Kiefer's Introduction to statistical inference was published.
Born 25, Jan 1924, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Died 10, Aug 1981, Berkeley, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Usa
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
