Erich Leo Lehmann (20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009) was a German-born American statistician, who made a major contribution to nonparametric hypothesis testing.

He grew up in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, until the Machtergreifung in 1933, when his family fled to Switzerland to escape the Nazis.

[2] Lehmann obtained his MA in mathematics in 1942 and his PhD (under Jerzy Neyman) in 1946, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1942.

In 1977 he married another statistician, Juliet Popper Shaffer, whom he had met four years earlier as the sponsor to her sabbatical visit to Berkeley.

In the same year, Shaffer moved from being a psychology professor at the University of Kansas to a lecturer position in statistics at Berkeley.