Leslie Kish (born Laszlo Kish, July 27, 1910, Poprad, Austro-Hungarian Empire, died October 7, 2000) was a Hungarian-American statistician and survey methodologist.[1]
Life and career
Kish emigrated with his family to the USA in 1925. His father soon died, and Kish helped support the family by working while continuing his studies in the evenings. In 1937 he volunteered for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Returning in 1939, he finished his baccalaureate in mathematics at the City College of New York.[1]
He worked at the U.S. Bureau of the Census from 1940 until 1941, when he moved to the Division of Program Surveys of the Department of Agriculture. For the remainder of World War II he served as a meteorologist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. After the war he returned to the Department of Agriculture, but in 1947 he joined the University of Michigan faculty.[1] He moved to the University of Michigan "as a member of the newly created Survey Research Center, which later became the Institute for Social Research (ISR). While working full time, Kish received an M.A. in mathematical statistics in 1948 and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1952. He became a lecturer at the University of Michigan in 1951, an Associate Professor in 1956, a professor in 1960 and professor emeritus in 1981".[2]
Awards and honors
In 1997, the American Statistical Association gave Kish their Wilks Memorial Award.[3]
Selected publications
- Kish, Leslie. Statistical Design for Research. New York: Wiley. 1987. ISBN 978-0471083597.
- Kish, Leslie (1965), Survey Sampling, New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0471109495.
- Kish, L. (1949), "A Procedure for Objective Respondent Selection within the Household", Journal of the American Statistical Association, 44: 380–387, JSTOR 2280236. On the basis of this paper, Kish's name is associated with the Kish grid.
References
- ^ a b c Fellegi, Ivan, Statisticians in History: Leslie Kish 1910–2000, American Statistical Association. Reprint of an obituary from International Statistical Institute (ISI) Newsletter, Volume 25, No. 73.
- ^ Quotation from "Leslie Kish," listed among "Notable Alumni" on the webpage of the U.S. Census Bureau. [retrieved August 19, 2014]
- ^ Samuel S. Wilks Award webpage at http://www.amstat.org/careers/samuelwilksaward.cfm
External links
- A conversation with Leslie Kish
- "Leslie Kish Papers: 1952-2001," in Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.