Henry Wynn

For the Welsh politician, see Henry Wynn (politician).
Not to be confused with Henry Wyn or Henry Wynne (disambiguation).

Henry Philip Wynn (19 February 1945 – 2 November 2024) was a British statistician who served as President of the Royal Statistical Society.[1]

He gained a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Oxford[citation needed] and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Imperial College, London.[2] He was appointed a Lecturer and then Reader at Imperial College before moving to City University London in 1985 as Professor of Mathematical Statistics (and Dean of Mathematics from 1987 to 1995). At City he co-founded the Engineering Design Centre.

He moved again, in 1995, to the University of Warwick as founding Director of the Risk Initiative and Statistical Consultancy Unit. He is currently, from 2003, Professor of Statistics at the Department of Statistics, London School of Economics where he leads the Decision Support and Risk Group.[3]

He was a founding president of the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS) and a Co-Investigator on the Research Councils UK funded project Managing Uncertainty in Complex Models (MUCM). He authored around 140 published papers and three books/monographs.

He was awarded the Guy Medal in Silver from the Royal Statistical Society and the George Box Medal from the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS),[4][5] was an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

He was the elected President of the Royal Statistical Society in 1977,[6] the first president to be elected by a contested vote. From 1834 to 1978, RSS Presidents had always been nominated and returned unopposed. In 1978 however there had been a lot of opposition when Council arranged for Sir Campbell Adamson to stand for Council, on the understanding that he would stand for and become president the following year. However, for the first time in living memory there was an election for Council, and Campbell Adamson came last out of a 25 candidates. (There were 25 candidates and 24 place on Council.) Despite this, Campbell Adamson was put up for president, and Wynn was nominated as an alternative candidate. Although Wynn was relatively unknown at the time, he won the election and completed his presidency.

He undertook a wide range of research in theoretical and applied statistics, focusing principally on model building. Projects with a biological focus include work in dynamic modelling in biology (multi-strain models).

Publications

Monographs since 2000

  • "Dynamical Search" (H.P.Wynn, L Pronzato and A Zhigljavsky), Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2000
  • "Algebraic Statistics" (H.P.Wynn, E Riccomagno and G Pistone), Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2001.
  • Wynn, Henry P (2021). Against Sacrifice: An essay on risk and ethics. Matador. ISBN 978-1800463363.

Selected papers

  • "The Sequential Generation of D-Optimum Experimental Designs" (Henry P. Wynn), The Annals of Mathematical Statistics (1970) jstor
  • "Design and Analysis of Computer Experiments" (Jerome Sacks, William J. Welch, Toby J. Mitchell and Henry P. Wynn). Statistical Science (1989). jstor

References

  1. ^ "Henry Philip Wynn, 1945–2024".
  2. ^ Henry Wynn at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ "Henry P. Wynn". London School of Economics. Archived from the original on 10 October 2010. Retrieved 22 January 2011.
  4. ^ "George Box Medal".
  5. ^ "LSE statistics department news". Archived from the original on 3 March 2011. Retrieved 7 April 2011.
  6. ^ "Royal Statistical Society - Presidents". Royal Statistical Society. Archived from the original on 17 March 2012. Retrieved 22 January 2011.