J.F.C. Kingman

Sir John Kingman, FRS, is currently the head of the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences, at Cambridge University, England. He is the N.M. Rothschild and Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences. He is also the Chairman of the Statistics Commission, which oversees the quality of official statistics in the United Kingdom. He was until recently Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol. He has also been head of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). He was formerly Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He has published five books and about 100 papers, and is widely known for his work on probability and stochastic processes. He has had a long-term side interest in population genetics. In 1982, he published three papers which laid the foundation for modern work on coalescent trees of genes:

• Kingman, J. F. C. 1982. On the genealogy of large populations. pp. 27-43 in Essays in Statistical Science, ed. J. Gani and E. J. Hannan. Applied Probability Trust, London. (Also as Journal of Applied Probability 19A: 27-43.)
• Kingman, J. F. C. 1982. The coalescent. Stochastic Processes and Their Applications 13: 235-248.
• Kingman, J. F. C. 1982. Exchangeability and the evolution of large populations. pp. 97-112 in Koch, G. and F. Spizzichino, eds. Exchangeability in Probability and Statistics. Proceedings of the International Conference on Exchangeability in Probability and Statistics, Rome, 6th-9th April, 1981, in honour of Professor Bruno de Finetti. North-Holland Elsevier, Amsterdam.

For more information on his life and work, see his web page in the collection of web pages at the University of St. Andrews about the lives of famous mathematicians.