Leslie Earl Simon (August 11, 1900 – October 28, 1983) was an American military officer and scientist, a major general in the U.S. Army's Ordnance Department, and director of the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground military facility in Maryland.

[1][2] He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1924, eventually attaining the rank of major general.

In 1945 he was made a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, in 1948 he was the first recipient of the Shewhart Medal and in 1966 he received the Wilks Memorial Award.

The citation for the latter read as follows: "To Major General Leslie E. Simon for his pioneering contributions to Quality Control, Sampling Inspection, Reliability and Army Design of Experiments, and for his timely promotion of statistical activities which have benefited not only the Army but our government and country as well."

The book has become a collector's item in Europe since Hergé featured it in the storyline of The Adventures of Tintin comic The Calculus Affair, published in 1956, where it appears on page 23.