Edwin James George Pitman (29 October 1897 – 21 July 1993) was an Australian mathematician who made significant contributions to statistics and probability theory.
[1] The Pitman–Koopman–Darmois theorem states that only exponential families of probability distributions admit a sufficient statistic whose dimension remains bounded as the sample size grows.
In 1926 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Tasmania, which he held until his retirement in 1962.
He was also active within the Statistical Society of Australia, which in 1978 named the Pitman medal in his honour.
Pitman contributed a chapter, "Reminiscences of a mathematician who strayed into statistics", to the volume He had four children, including Jim Pitman, a Professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley.