Jerzy Neyman

Jerzy Neyman (April 16, 1894 – August 5, 1981), born Jerzy Spława-Neyman, was a Polish-American mathematician and statistician.

He was born into a Polish family in Bendery, Bessarabia in Imperial Russia, the second of four children of Czesław Spława-Neyman and Kazimiera Lutosławska. His family was Roman Catholic and Neyman served as an altar boy during his early childhood. Later, Neyman would become an agnostic. Neyman's family descended from a long line of Polish nobles and military heroes. He began studies at Kharkov University in 1912, where he was taught by Russian probabilist Sergei Natanovich Bernstein. After he read 'Lessons on the integration and the research of the primitive functions' by Henri Lebesgue, he was fascinated with measure and integration.

In 1921 he returned to Poland in a program of repatriation of POWs after the Polish-Soviet War. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree at University of Warsaw in 1924. He was examined by Wacław Sierpiński and Stefan Mazurkiewicz, among others. He spent a couple of years in London and Paris on a fellowship to study statistics with Karl Pearson and Emile Borel. After his return to Poland he established the Biometric Laboratory at the Nencki Institute in Warsaw.

He published many books dealing with experiments and statistics. He devised the way which the FDA tests medicines today.

He introduced the confidence interval in his paper in 1937.

One of his contributions is the Neyman-Pearson lemma.

His paper "On the Two Different Aspects of the Representative Method: The Method of Stratified Sampling and the Method of Purposive Selection" given at the Royal Statistical Society on 19 June 1934 was the groundbreaking event leading to modern scientific sampling.

In 1938 he moved to Berkeley, where he worked for the rest of his life. Thirty-nine students received their Ph.D's under his advisorship. In 1966 he was awarded the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society and three years later the (American) Medal of Science. He died in Oakland, California.