Joseph Oscar Irwin (17 December 1898 – 27 July 1982) was a British statistician who advanced the use of statistical methods in biological assay and other fields of laboratory medicine.
Irwin's grasp of modern mathematical statistics distinguished him not only from older medical statisticians like Major Greenwood but contemporaries like Austin Bradford Hill.
In his appreciation Greenberg recalls the mathematical statisticians R. C. Bose and S. N. Roy telling him how by reading Irwin they been able to understand Fisher.
These were applied studies but he continued to work on more mathematical problems, e.g. he produced a series of papers on the generalized Waring distribution.
He was a lovable absent-minded kind of professor who smoked more matches than he did tobacco in his ever-present pipe while he was deeply involved in thinking about other important matters.