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Martin Wilk

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Martin Wilk
Chief Statistician of Canada
In office
1980–1985
Preceded byJames L. Fry (interim)
Succeeded byIvan Fellegi
Personal details
Born(1922-12-18)18 December 1922
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Died19 February 2013(2013-02-19) (aged 90)
Yorba Linda, California
Alma mater

Martin Bradbury Wilk, OC (18 December 1922 – 19 February 2013)[1][2] was a Canadian statistician, academic, and the former chief statistician of Canada. In 1965, together with Samuel Shapiro, he developed the Shapiro–Wilk test, which can indicate whether a sample of numbers would be unusual if it came from a Gaussian distribution. With Ramanathan Gnanadesikan he developed a number of important graphical techniques for data analysis, including the Q–Q plot and P–P plot.

Education and career

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Born in Montreal, Quebec, he received a bachelor of engineering degree in chemical engineering from McGill University in 1945. From 1945 to 1950, he was a research chemical engineer on the Atomic Energy Project at the National Research Council of Canada. From 1951 to 1955, he was a research associate, instructor, and assistant professor at Iowa State University, where he received a Master of Science in statistics in 1953 and a Ph.D. in statistics in 1955 under the supervision of Oscar Kempthorne. From 1955 to 1957, he was a research associate and assistant director of the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton University. From 1959 to 1963, he was a professor and director of research in statistics at Rutgers University.[1]

In 1956, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories and in 1970 joined American Telephone and Telegraph Company. From 1976 to 1980, he was the assistant vice president-director of corporate planning. From 1980 to 1985, he was the chief statistician of Canada.[1]

In 1981, he was appointed an adjunct professor of statistics at Carleton University.

In 1962 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[3] In 1999, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for his "insightful guidance on important matters related to our country's national statistical system".[1][4]

See also

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  • Wilk – people with the surname Wilk

References

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  1. ^ a b c d "Martin B. Wilk". The Ottawa Citizen. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. February 23, 2013. p. 59. Retrieved November 5, 2020 – via Newspapers.com. Open access icon
  2. ^ Lennick, Michael (10 April 2013). "Martin Wilk remembered as 'the best statistician in Canada's history'". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 24 November 2013.
  3. ^ View/Search Fellows of the ASA Archived 2016-06-16 at the Wayback Machine, accessed 2016-07-23.
  4. ^ Order of Canada citation