Harold Silverstone (1915–1974) was a New Zealand mathematician and statistician.

Harold Silverstone
Born
Harold Silverstone

20 January 1915[1]
Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand[1]
Died1974[1]
Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand[1]
NationalityNew Zealand
Alma materUniversity of Otago
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Doctoral advisorAlexander Aitken

Early life and education

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He was born on 20 January 1915 in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand. His father Mark Woolf Silverstone was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Harold Silverstone was educated at Otago Boys High School. He later attended the University of Otago where he attained a B.A. in 1934 and an M.A. in 1935. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1939.[2][3]

Academic career

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He was appointed a lecturer at the Department of Mathematics at the Otago University in 1946. He was appointed as the Statistician to the New Zealand National Service Department in 1940.[3]

Contributions to mathematics

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He has made numerous contributions to mathematics, such as independently deriving the Cramér–Rao bound.[4][5][6]

Personal life

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He was married twice, once to Madge Silverstone and another time to Eleanor Matilda Silverstone.[1]

He was a lifelong member of the New Zealand Communist Party.[7]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e "Harold Silverstone". geni_family_tree.
  2. ^ "UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO GRADUATION CEREMONY". paperspast.natlib.govt.nz. 13 May 1936. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  3. ^ a b "A-History-of-Statistics-in-New-Zealand" (PDF). www.stats.org.nz. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-01-29. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  4. ^ "Two New Zealand pioneer econometricians" (PDF). www.researchgate.net. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  5. ^ Aitken, A. C.; Silverstone, H. (1942). "On the Estimation of Statistical Parameters". Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 61 (2): 186–194. doi:10.1017/s008045410000618x. S2CID 124029876.
  6. ^ Shenton, L. R. (1970). "The so-called Cramer–Rao inequality". The American Statistician. 24 (2): 36. JSTOR 2681931.
  7. ^ "1.a - New Zealand Communist Party, Harold Silverstone resignation., 1957 - 1958 | ArchivesSpace Public Interface". archives.library.auckland.ac.nz.
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