Arthur Pentland Dempster (born 1929) is a Professor Emeritus in the Harvard University Department of Statistics.

He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton University in 1956.

His thesis, titled The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case, was written under the supervision of John Tukey.

Among his contributions to statistics are the Dempster–Shafer theory and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm.

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