Maurice Kendall

Sir Maurice George Kendall, FBA (6 September 1907 – 29 March 1983) was a prominent British statistician.

After growing up in Derby, England, he studied mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, where he played cricket and chess (with future champions Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander and Jacob Bronowski).

Kendall became Assistant general manager to the British Chamber of Shipping by day and had air-raid warden duties by night.

[citation needed] In 1953, he published "The Analytics of Economic Time Series, Part 1: Prices"[7] in which he suggested that the movement of shares on the stock market was random (as likely to go up on a certain day as to go down).

[citation needed] In 1961 he left the University of London and took a position as the managing director (later chairman) of a consulting company, CEIR (later known as Scientific Control Systems), and in the same year began a two-year term as president of the Royal Statistical Society.

[citation needed] He was knighted by the British government in 1974 for his services to the theory of statistics, and received a medal from the United Nations in 1980 in recognition for his work on the World Fertility Survey.

He was also elected a fellow of the British Academy and received the highest honour of the Royal Statistical Society, the Guy Medal in Gold.