A conversation with Dennis Lindley

Abstract

Dennis Victor Lindley was born on 25 July 1923 in south London, England, and his childhood was mainly spent in Surbiton, a southwestern suburb of London. He was educated nearby at Tiffin Boys’ School and read Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where he later became Director of the Statistical Laboratory. In 1947 he married Joan Armitage, cousin of the statistician Peter Armitage, and they have three children: Janet, Rowan and Robert. He later occupied chairs in statistics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at University College London before taking early retirement in 1977. Since then he has travelled widely, holding visiting posts at Berkeley, Chicago, Madison, Tallahassee, Washington DC, Sao Paulo, Melbourne, Purdue, Duke, Davis, Iowa, Rome and Bloemfontein. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the American Statistical Association. He has a Guy medal from the Royal Statistical Society, and in 1988 was the IMS Wald Lecturer. © 1995 by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.