Jerzy Neyman — statistician with roots in the Russian Empire
Jerzy Spława-Neyman was born on 16 April 1894 in Bendery, in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Bender in Moldova, into a Polish-speaking family; his father was a lawyer, and the family soon moved within the Empire, first to the Crimea and in 1906, after his father's death, to Kharkov. He was taught at home by governesses in French and German, and in 1912 entered Kharkov University to study physics and mathematics.
There the mathematician Sergei Bernstein introduced him to probability and to Karl Pearson's Grammar of Science. Neyman stayed on as a lecturer at Kharkov's Institute of Technology from 1917 to 1921. During the Polish–Soviet war he was briefly detained as a Pole, and in 1921, under an exchange of nationals agreed at the end of the war, he went to Poland; some years later he dropped the 'Spława' from his name.
He worked as a statistician at the National Agricultural Institute in Bydgoszcz, lectured in Warsaw, and in 1924 took his doctorate at the University of Warsaw. A Polish government fellowship took him to Karl Pearson's laboratory at University College London in 1925, where he began a decade-long collaboration with Pearson's son Egon. Together they developed the theory of hypothesis testing that bears their names, introducing the alternative hypothesis and the two kinds of error; Neyman went on to introduce confidence intervals, presented in his London lectures of 1934 and published in 1937.
In 1934 he joined Egon Pearson at University College as a senior lecturer and then reader, and in 1938 moved to the University of California, Berkeley. There he founded the Statistical Laboratory and, in 1955, a department of statistics that became one of the leading centres of mathematical statistics in the world, and organised the Berkeley Symposia on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, held every five years. His later work ranged from agricultural experiments to the statistics of galaxy clusters. He received the Guy Medal in Gold of the Royal Statistical Society in 1966 and the US National Medal of Science in 1968, and was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society.
He died in Oakland, California, on 5 August 1981, aged eighty-seven.
"Left Soviet Ukraine for Poland in 1921 in an exchange of nationals after the Polish–Soviet war; moved to London in 1934 and to Berkeley in 1938."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Bendery, Bessarabia Governorate (now Bender, Moldova); raised in Crimea and Kharkov
Born Jerzy Spława-Neyman in Bendery, Bessarabia, in 1894 into a Polish-speaking family, he grew up in Bessarabia, the Crimea and Kharkov, studied and taught at Kharkov until 1921 and then went to Poland.
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Bendery, Bessarabia Governorate (now Bender, Moldova); raised in Crimea and Kharkov. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.