Edward H Simpson 1922-2019

We are very sad to hear the news that, Edward Simpson, Bletchley Park code-breaker and the mathematician behind Simpson’s Paradox, has died aged 96. Edward was an RSS fellow since 1946.

From 1942 to 1945 he was a code breaker at Bletchley Park, where he and others broke enemy ciphers and where the world's first modern computer was developed, as he describes in this Signficance article from 2010.

Following the end of the war, he studied for a PhD in Mathematics at Cambridge where he devised the Simpson's paradox, which he published in 1951 and which has puzzled students of statistics ever since.

He spent most of his working life after 1947 in the civil service, working in the Ministry of Education, the Treasury, the Privy Council and the Department of Education and Science. He was appointed Order of the Bath (CB) in 1976.

More about his life is detailed in this Telegraph obituary.

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