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Henry
Scheffé studied pure mathematics at the University of Wisconsin
receiving his BA in 1931. He wrote a doctoral thesis on differential equations
and was awarded his PhD in 1935. His doctoral dissertation The Asymptotic
Solutions of Certain Linear Differential Equations in Which the Coefficient
of the Parameter May Have a Zero was supervised by Rudolph Langer.
Still a pure mathematician, Scheffé taught at the University of
Wisconsin from 1935 to 1937, then spent three of the next four years at
Oregon State University with the year 1939-40 spent at Reed College.
In 1941 Scheffé moved
from pure mathematics to statistics, joining Wilks at Princeton. Having
trained as a statistician, he taught at Syracuse in session 1944-45, UCLA
from 1946 until 1948 when he went to Columbia University. |
After five years at Columbia, Scheffé
went to Berkeley as professor of statistics in 1953. He was to remain at
Berkeley for the rest of his life, retiring from his chair in 1974. He
was chairman of department at both Columbia and Berkeley.
Scheffé, perhaps not
surprisingly given his route into statistics, was interested in the more
mathematical areas of statistics. He was particularly interested in optimal
properties and he extended the Neyman - Pearson theory of best similar
test.
His research was influenced
by certain consultancy positions he held such as one at the Office of Scientific
Research and Development from 1943 to 1946.
After 1950 Scheffé's
research was concerned with aspects of linear models, particularly the
analysis of variance. One of his most important papers appeared in 1953
on the S-method of simultaneous confidence intervals for estimable functions
in a subspace of the parameter space.
He also studied other aspects
of analysis of variance such as paired comparisons which he studied in
1952, then mixed models studied two years later. In 1958 and again in 1963
he published on experiments on mixtures and in 1973 he wrote on calibration
methods.
Scheffé's most important
work was a comprehensive review of nonparametric statistics in 1943 and
his book The Analysis of Variance (1959). He was in the middle of
a revision of this book when he died as the result of a bicycle accident.
Scheffé was elected to
many statistical societies. He became a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics in 1944, the American Statistical Association in 1952 and the
International Statistical Institute in 1962. |
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