George Seber: A statistical ecology pioneer and scientist par excellence

Abstract

George Seber was born in Sydney, Australia, on April 6, 1938, and moved to New Zealand when he was 7 years old. He took his bachelor's and master's degrees at Auckland University and then continued his graduate studies under a Commonwealth Scholarship at Manchester University, England, in 1960. After completing a Ph.D. in Statistics there in 1963, he spent 2 years as an Assistant Lecturer in Statistics at the London School of Economics. While in Manchester, John Darroch interested him in capture-recapture models. In 1965, two independent papers in Biometrika by the two Georges (Jolly and Seber) introduced to the world the Jolly-Seber open capture-recapture model (Jolly 1965; Seber 1965). In 1965, George returned to New Zealand and joined the Auckland University Mathematics Department. In 1971, he was invited to a personal Chair in Biometrics at the University of Otago, but he later returned to Auckland in 1973 to take up the first Chair in Statistics and the Headship of a newly created Statistics Unit within the Mathematics Department. In 1972, the first edition of The Estimation of Animal Abundance was published and, as we shall see later, this had a profound influence on the field. His reputation as a scientist of great distinction was established. Seber has published many papers from 1962 until the present. He has taught and mentored numerous undergraduate and graduate students. Writing eight books covering many areas of statistics has been a major occupation throughout his career. He was involved with establishing a new Department of Statistics at Auckland University in 1994. He has received many honors and was recently awarded the Hector medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand. His current research interests are in adaptive sampling, methods of estimating