[1][2] During his time at Glasgow, he wrote The Lognormal Distribution, With Special Reference to its Uses in Economics (1957) with J A C Brown (who he met at Cambridge).

[1] However, he left Glasgow in 1962, when the University of Liverpool offered him the positions of Senior Lecturer and head of Mathematical Statistics.

He resigned from the University of Glasgow the year after and founded the Hong Kong Statistical Society.

[1][4] He dedicated one of his books on compositional data to his wife, writing ‘to M, the constant among variables.’[4] Aitchison died in December 2016 at the age of 90.

During his time at the University of Edinburgh, Aitchison was awarded a Foundations of Analysis medal, and later a Bruce of Grangehill scholarship.

[6] In 1995 he received the William Christian Krumbein Medal of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences for his work on statistical tools which were used within the field.