Henry Scheffé

Henry Scheffé (April 11, 1907 – July 5, 1977) was an American statistician.^[1][2] He is known for the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and Scheffé's method.

Henry Scheffé
Born	(1907-04-11)April 11, 1907 New York City
Died	June 5, 1977(1977-06-05) (aged 70) Berkeley, California
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Cooper Union University of Wisconsin–Madison
Known for	Lehmann–Scheffé theorem Scheffé's method Scheffé's lemma
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematician, Statistician
Doctoral advisor	Rudolf Ernest Langer
Doctoral students	William Kruskal

Education and career

Scheffé was born in New York City on April 11, 1907, the child of German immigrants. The family moved to Islip, New York, where Scheffé went to high school. He graduated in 1924, took night classes at Cooper Union, and a year later entered the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1928, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics there in 1931.^[2] Staying at Wisconsin, he married his wife Miriam in 1934 and finished his PhD in 1935, on the subject of differential equations, under the supervision of Rudolf Ernest Langer.^[1][2][3]

After teaching mathematics at Wisconsin, Oregon State University, and Reed College, Scheffé moved to Princeton University in 1941. At Princeton, he began working in statistics instead of in pure mathematics, and assisted the U.S. war effort as a consultant with the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Scheffé moved several more times, to Syracuse University in 1944, the University of California, Los Angeles in 1946, and Columbia University in 1948, where he chaired the statistics department. He settled at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 until he retired in 1974; he took a turn as department chair there as well, from 1965 to 1968. After retiring from Berkeley, he spent more years on the faculty of Indiana University.^[1][2]

In 1951 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.^[4] Scheffé was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1954, and also served as vice president of the American Statistical Association from 1954 to 1956.^[2]

Scheffé died in Berkeley.

References

1. O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F. (May 2000), "Henry Scheffé", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
2. Daniel, C.; Lehmann, E. L. (1979). "Henry Scheffe 1907–1977". Annals of Statistics. 7 (6): 1149–1161. doi:10.1214/aos/1176344837.
3. Henry Scheffé at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
4. View/Search Fellows of the ASA Archived 2016-06-16 at the Wayback Machine, accessed 2016-07-23.