Erich Leo Lehmann

Erich Lehmann
Born	(1917-11-20)20 November 1917 Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, German Empire
Died	12 September 2009(2009-09-12) (aged 91)
Nationality	American
Fields	Statistics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	Doctor of Philosophy - University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Jerzy Neyman
Doctoral students	Peter J. Bickel
Known for	Testing Statistical Hypotheses Completeness (statistics) Lehmann–Scheffé theorem Hodges–Lehmann estimator nonparametric tests
Influences	Abraham Wald Henry Scheffé Alfred Tarski
Notable awards	President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow of the American Statistical Association American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Academy of Science.

Erich Leo Lehmann (20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009) was an American statistician, who made a major contribution to nonparametric hypothesis testing. He is one of the eponyms of the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and of the Hodges–Lehmann estimator of the median of a population.

Lehmann was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine in 1917 to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. He grew up in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, until the Machtergreifung in 1933 his family fled to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. He graduated from high school in Zurich, and studied mathematics for two years at Trinity College, Cambridge. Following that, he emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York in late 1940. He enrolled in University of California, Berkeley as a post-graduate student—albeit without a prior degree—in 1941.

Lehmann obtained his MA in mathematics in 1942 and his PhD (under Jerzy Neyman) in 1946, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1942. From August 1944 to August 1945 he worked as an operations analyst for the United States Air Force on Guam. He taught at Columbia University and at Princeton University during 1950–51, and then during 1951–1952 he was a visiting associate professor at Stanford University.