Arthur P. Dempster

Arthur P. Dempster
Prof Dempster at the workshop on Belief Function Theory (Brest 1 April 2010).
Born	1929 (age 87–88)
Fields	Statistics
Institutions	Harvard University
Alma mater	Princeton University (PhD 1956) University of Toronto (BA 1952; MA 1953)
Thesis	The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case (1956)
Doctoral advisor	John Tukey
Doctoral students	Nan Laird
Known for	Dempster–Shafer theory, EM algorithm
Notable awards	Putnam Fellow (1961) ASA Fellow (1964) IMS Fellow (1963) Guggenheim Fellow AAAS Fellow (1997)

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