Arthur P. Dempster

Arthur Pentland Dempster (born 1929) is a Professor Emeritus in the Harvard University Department of Statistics. He was one of four faculty when the department was founded in 1957.

Dempster received his B.A. in mathematics and physics (1952) and M.A. in mathematics (1953), both from the University of Toronto. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton University in 1956. His thesis, titled The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case, was written under the supervision of John Tukey.

Among his contributions to statistics are the Dempster–Shafer theory and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm.

• Dempster, A. P. (1967), "Upper and lower probabilities induced by a multivalued mapping", The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 38 (2): 325–339, doi:10.1214/aoms/1177698950
• Dempster, A. P.; Laird, N.; Rubin, D. B. (1977), "Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 39 (1): 1–38, JSTOR 2984875

Dempster was a Putnam Fellow in 1951. He was elected to ASA Fellow in 1964, IMS Fellow in 1963, and AAAS Fellow in 1997.