John Aitchison

John Aitchison (22 July 1926 – 23 December 2016) was a Scottish statistician.

Career

John Aitchison studied at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge.

From 1966 to 1976 he was Titular Professor of Statistics and Mitchell Lecturer in Statistics at the University of Glasgow.

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1968.

In 1976 he joined the University of Hong Kong as a Chair Professor of Statistics.

On his retirement from the University of Hong Kong in 1989, he joined the University of Virginia as Professor and Chairman of Division of Statistics.

In 1986 he published the book The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data, the key reference to date on the analysis of compositional data.

Personal life

In 1952, he married Muriel Shackleton and they had three children together. Aitchison died in December 2016 at the age of 90.

Awards

In 1988, Aitchison received the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society for the 'paper on "The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data", which he read to the Society on 13 January 1982 (JRSS B 44 139–177), and for influential contributions to distribution theory, practical Bayesian statistics, statistical diagnosis in medicine and many other areas of applied and theoretical statistics.'

In 1997 he received the William Christian Krumbein Medal of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences for a 'distinguished career as author and researcher in the field of mathematical geology.'

Books authored

• The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data, Aitchison, J. (1986)
• The Lognormal Distribution, Aitchison, J. and Brown, J.A.C. (1957)
• Statistical Prediction Analysis, Aitchison, J. and Dunsmore, I.R. (1975)