A Conversation with Oscar Kempthorne

Abstract

Oscar Kempthorne was born on January 13, 1919, in St. Tudy, Cornwall, England. His schooling was in Cornwall. He received a B.A. with Honors from Cambridge University in 1940, an M.A. from Cambridge in 1943, and was awarded an Sc.D. degree from Cambridge in 1960. He worked at Rothamsted Experiment Station from 1941 to 1946 and joined the Department at Iowa State College as Associate Professor in 1947. He was promoted to Professor in 1951, and was named Distinguished Professor of Science and Humanities in 1964. He was President of the Biometric Society, ENAR, in 1961 and President of the Institute of Mathematical from 1984 to 1985. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He was awarded an honorary Ph.D. degree from the University of Ioannina in Greece. This conversation took place at Dr. Kempthorne's home in Ames, Iowa on March 7, 1994. Folks: Kemp, I have enjoyed watching your ASA videotape From Observation to Inference (ASA archives) and I know about the videotape of your lecture The Adventures of a Cornish Farm Boy in Search of Statistics (Kempthorne personal copy). I am very interested in your university days.