M.G. Kendall

Sir Maurice George Kendall, FBA (6 September 1907 – 29 March 1983) was a British statistician, widely known for his contribution to statistics. The Kendall tau rank correlation is named after him.

Maurice Kendall was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire as the only child of John Roughton Kendall and Georgina Brewer. As a young child he survived a case of cerebral meningitis, which was frequently fatal at that time. After growing up in Derby, England, he studied mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, where he played cricket and chess (with future champions Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander and Jacob Bronowski). After graduation as a Mathematics Wrangler in 1929, he joined the British Civil Service in the Ministry of Agriculture. In this position he became increasingly interested in using statistics towards agricultural questions, and one of his first published papers to the Royal Statistical Society involved studying crop productivity using factor analysis. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1934.

In 1938 and 1939 he began work, along with Bernard Babington-Smith, on the question of random number generation, developing both one of the first early mechanical devices to produce random digits, and formulated a series of tests for statistical randomness in a given set of digits which, with some small modifications, became fairly widely used. He produced one of the second large collections of random digits (100,000 in total, over twice as many as those published by L. H. C. Tippett in 1927), which was a commonly used tract until the publication of RAND Corporation's A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates in 1955 (which was developed with a roulette wheel-like machine very similar to Kendall's and verified as "random" using his statistical tests).

...
Wikipedia