George Alfred Barnard (23 September 1915 – 30 July 2002) was a British statistician known particularly for his work on the foundations of statistics and on quality control.
Barnard was on holiday in Britain when the Second World War started and he never went back to Princeton to finish his PhD.
In 1942 he moved to the Ministry of Supply to apply quality control and sampling methods to the products for which they were responsible.
The group he was put in charge of included Peter Armitage, Dennis Lindley and Robin Plackett.
At the end of the war, Barnard went to Imperial College London, as a lecturer, becoming a reader in 1948 and professor of mathematical statistics in 1954.
He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1933 and took part in anti-fascist marches in the east end of London.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm, a fellow communist at Cambridge, recalled him as a "lean-and-hungry-looking mathematician from a working class family" who served as the "student Party's chief local commissar.
In 1990 he made a book out of manuscripts left by his friend Egon Pearson: After 1990 Barnard published little, although he kept up his letter writing.