Douglas Paul Wiens is a Canadian statistician; he is a professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta.
Wiens earned a B.Sc. in mathematics (1972), two master's degrees in mathematical logic (1974) and statistics (1979), and a Ph.D. in statistics (1982), all from the University of Calgary.[1] As part of his work on mathematical logic, in connection with Hilbert's tenth problem, Wiens helped find a diophantine formula for the primes: that is, multivariate polynomial with the property that the positive values of this polynomial, over integer arguments, are exactly the prime numbers.[2] Wiens and his co-authors won the Lester R. Ford award of the Mathematical Association of America in 1977 for their paper describing this result.[3] His Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Robust Estimation for Multivariate Location and Scale in the Presence of Asymmetry and was supervised by John R. Collins.[4] After receiving his Ph.D. in 1982, Wiens took a faculty position at Dalhousie University, and moved in 1987 to Alberta.[1]
Wiens was editor-in-chief of The Canadian Journal of Statistics from 2004 to 2006[5] and program chair of the 2003 annual meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada.[6] Along with the Ford award, Wiens received The Canadian Journal of Statistics Award in 1990 for his paper "Minimax-variance L- and R-estimators of location".[7] In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[8]