Martin Wilk should not be confused with Martin Wilke.
Martin Wilk | |
Office: | Chief Statistician of Canada |
Predecessor: | James L. Fry (interim) |
Successor: | Ivan Fellegi |
Term Start: | 1980 |
Term End: | 1985 |
Birth Date: | 18 December 1922 |
Birth Place: | Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
Death Place: | Yorba Linda, California |
Martin Bradbury Wilk, (18 December 1922 – 19 February 2013)[1] [2] was a Canadian statistician, academic, and the former chief statistician of Canada. In 1965, together with Samuel Shapiro, he developed the Shapiro–Wilk test, which can indicate whether a sample of numbers would be unusual if it came from a Gaussian distribution. With Ramanathan Gnanadesikan he developed a number of important graphical techniques for data analysis, including the Q–Q plot and P–P plot.
Born in Montreal, Quebec, he received a bachelor of engineering degree in chemical engineering from McGill University in 1945. From 1945 to 1950, he was a research chemical engineer on the Atomic Energy Project at the National Research Council of Canada. From 1951 to 1955, he was a research associate, instructor, and assistant professor at Iowa State University, where he received a Master of Science in statistics in 1953 and a Ph.D. in statistics in 1955 under the supervision of Oscar Kempthorne. From 1955 to 1957, he was a research associate and assistant director of the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton University. From 1959 to 1963, he was a professor and director of research in statistics at Rutgers University.[1]
In 1956, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories and in 1970 joined American Telephone and Telegraph Company. From 1976 to 1980, he was the assistant vice president-director of corporate planning. From 1980 to 1985, he was the chief statistician of Canada.[1]
In 1981, he was appointed an adjunct professor of statistics at Carleton University.
In 1962 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[3] In 1999, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for his "insightful guidance on important matters related to our country's national statistical system".[1]