Zygmunt Wilhelm Birnbaum

Z. W. (Bill) Birnbaum
Born 1903
Died 2000
Citizenship American
Fields Statistics, Mathematics
Institutions University of Washington, Seattle
Alma mater Doctor of Philosophy – University of Lwów
Doctoral advisor Hugo Steinhaus
Notable students Ronald Pyke, Albert Marshall, Sam Saunders
Known for

Birnbaum-Marshall inequality
Birnbaum–Orlicz space
Birnbaum–Saunders distribution

nonparametric tests
Influences Władysław Orlicz
Stanisław Mazur
Stefan Banach
Notable awards

President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Fellow of the American Statistical Association
Elected member of the International Statistical Institute
Guggenheim Fellowship


Wilks Memorial Award of the American Statistical Association

Zygmunt Wilhelm Birnbaum (18 October 1903 – 15 December 2000) was a Polish-American mathematician and statistician who contributed to functional analysis, nonparametric testing and estimation, probability inequalities, survival distributions, competing risks, and reliability theory.

After first earning a law degree and briefly practicing law, Birnbaum obtained his PhD in 1929 at the University of Lwów under the supervision of Hugo Steinhaus, and was associated with the Lwów School of Mathematics. He visited Göttingen, Germany from 1929 to 1931.

After studying insurance mathematics and earning a Versicherungsmathematik Diplom with Felix Bernstein in Göttingen, he worked as an actuary in Vienna during 1931–1932, and was then transferred to Lwów where he continued working as an actuary. After obtaining a position as a correspondent for a Polish newspaper, he arrived in New York as a reporter in 1937. He became a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington in 1939 (with help from Harold Hotelling and letters of reference from Richard Courant, Albert Einstein, and Edmund Landau).

Birnbaum was actively involved in reliability work with Boeing through the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories during the late 1950s and 1960s, and was a key member of the "Seattle school of reliability", a group which also included Tom Bray, Gordon Crawford, James Esary, George Marsaglia, Al Marshall, Frank Proschan, Ron Pyke, and Sam Saunders.

Birnbaum served as Editor of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics (1967–1970) and as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1964). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 (spent at the Sorbonne, Paris), and a Fulbright Program Fellowship in 1964 (spent at the University of Rome).

Selected publications

Books

Articles

References

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