Wilfrid Dixon
Wilfrid Joseph Dixon was an American mathematician and statistician. He made notable contributions to nonparametric statistics.
A native of Portland, Oregon, Dixon received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oregon State College in 1938. He continued his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he earned a master's degree in 1939. Under supervision of Samuel S. Wilks, he then earned a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton in 1944.
Dixon was on the faculties at Oklahoma, Oregon, and UCLA. During World War II, he was an operations analyst on Guam. In the 1960s at UCLA, Dixon developed BMDP, a statistical software package for biomedical analyses.
In 1955 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. His daughter, Janet D. Elashoff, also became a UCLA faculty member, and a fellow in 1978. In December 2008 she funded the W. J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting of the American Statistical Association in his honor.
