Martin Wilk

Martin Bradbury Wilk, OC (18 December 1922 – 19 February 2013)[1][2] was a Canadian statistician, academic, and the former Chief Statistician of Canada. In 1965, together with Samuel Shapiro, he developed the Shapiro–Wilk test, which can indicate whether a sample of numbers would be unusual if it came from a Gaussian distribution. With Ramanathan Gnanadesikan he developed a number of important graphical techniques for data analysis, including the Q–Q plot and P–P plot.

Born in Montreal, Quebec, he received a bachelor of engineering degree in chemical engineering from McGill University in 1945. From 1945 to 1950, he was a Research Chemical Engineer on the Atomic Energy Project at the National Research Council of Canada. From 1951 to 1955, he was a Research Associate, Instructor, and Assistant Professor at Iowa State University, where he received a Master of Science in Statistics in 1953 and a Ph.D. in Statistics in 1955. From 1955 to 1957, he was a Research Associate and Assistant Director of the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton University. From 1959 to 1963, he was a Professor and Director of Research in Statistics at Rutgers University.[1]

In 1956, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories and in 1970 joined American Telephone and Telegraph Company. From 1976 to 1980, he was the Assistant Vice President-Director of Corporate Planning. From 1980 to 1985, he was the Chief Statistician of Canada.[1]

In 1981, he was appointed an Adjunct Professor of Statistics at Carleton University.

In 1962 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[3] In 1999, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for his "insightful guidance on important matters related to our country's national statistical system".[1][4]