Henry Oliver Lancaster 1913 - 2001

Abstract

Llewellyn became a medical practitioner in Kempsey. He had done his training at the University of Sydney. HOL's mother, Edie, was Llewellyn's second wife. She was a nurse who had completed her general nursing training at Kalgoorlie District Hospital, Western Australia. Edie belonged to a powerful Western Australian family that included the Forrests (one first cousin was a Forrest). Sir John Forrest (1847-1918), the most eminent of the Forrests, is an outstanding figure in Australian history. Western Australia's first premier (1890-1901), he * Eugene Seneta, FAA, succeeded H.O. Lancaster as Professor and Head of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Sydney in 1979. Denoted by 'ES' in the sequel. ** Geoff. Eagleson was one of Lancaster's first PhD students in Mathematical Statistics (PhD, University of Sydney, 1967). * HOL's publications are consecutively numbered within each of two separate lists at the conclusion of this biographical memoir. Thus II.83 refers to item 83 in list II. References in the text to other works are in the usual name and date format, and are to be found under 'References'. 1998 85. (with E. Seneta) Chi-square distribution. In Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. P. Armitage and T. Colton (Eds).

Comment on the Paper by Gani

“…Oliver Lancaster (1913–2001), the Foundation Professor of Statistics at the University of Sydney, was known to us in the SSAI (Statistical Society of Australia Inc.) both in that capacity and as a medical statistician. His first post in Sydney, from the end of World War II onwards, was in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, from where he ultimately submitted about fifty manuscripts to the Medical Journal of Australia in what he described as his Mortality Series (see Section 5 of Seneta & Eagleson, 2004). The most striking finding in his series of investigations on the prevalence of cancer was that death rates from malignant melanomas were higher amongst people living nearer to the equator.…”

“…There he found peaks in the distribution of deaf people born around 1898 and 1899, a time of known rubella epidemics in Australia. These and other observations led him to write in autobiographical notes (Seneta & Eagleson 2004).…”