About the Project
About the Project

Profile
Ingram Olkin

Photograph of Ingram Olkin

Ingram Olkin (b. 1924 in Waterbury, Connecticut, d. 2016) was Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Education in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University, California.

Olkin’s degrees are B.S. in mathematics, City College, New York, M.A. in mathematical statistics, Columbia University, New York, and Ph.D. in mathematical statistics, University of North Carolina.

Olkin’s research covered a broad range of areas, including multivariate analysis, reliability theory, matrix theory, statistical models in the social and behavioral sciences, life distributions, and meta-analysis. His well-known books in the statistics community include Theory of Majorization and its Applications (with A. W. Marshall), published by Academic Press in 1979, Statistical Methods for Meta-Analysis (with L. V. Hedges), published by Academic Press in 1985, and Life Distributions: Non-Parametric, Semi-Parametric, and Parametric Families (with A. W. Marshall), published by Springer in 2008.

Olkin was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1959, and President in 1984. He was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1961, and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Education in 2005. He was a Fellow of the U.K. Royal Statistical Society. He also was a Guggenheim, Fulbright, Humboldt, and Lady Davis Fellow, had an honorary degree from De Montfort University, and was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal by the City University of New York.

Olkin was a member of the original editorial committee for the DLMF project, in existence from the mid-1990’s to the mid-2010’s. During this time he served as Associate Editor with responsibilities for all aspects of the project. The original committee was reconstituted in 2015; for details see About the Project.