James Robert Thompson (June 18, 1938 – December 4, 2017) was an American mathematician, statistician, and university professor whose most influential work combined applied mathematics and nonparametric statistics with computing technologies to advance the fields of financial engineering and computational finance, model disease progression, assess problems in public health, and optimize quality control in industrial manufacturing.
The training manual and teachings are reflected in the previously mentioned book Statistical Process Control: The Deming Paradigm and Beyond.
These non-parametric approaches to portfolio formulation included the Simugram™, variants of his Max-Median rule and Tukey weightings.
In 1977, he began working with clinicians and researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine to statistically correlate the relationship between plasma lipid concentrations and coronary artery disease.
[18][19][20] His work in mathematical biology also positioned him as an early proponent of the prevention and control of contagious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, by case isolation, quarantine, and public education.
He is particularly known for his work in correlating the effect that the HIV epidemic had on an increased number of tuberculosis cases in the United States.
He was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1984) and founded the ASA Houston Chapter in 1981.