John E. Walsh

Brief Biography

John Walsh was the 16th President of ORSA. He was an eminent statistician who was the Mobil Endowed Professor of Statistics at Southern Methodist University from 1967-72. He had worked at a number of Aerospace firms include Lockheed, Douglas, the RAND Corporation, and Systems Development Corporation. He had also worked for the Bureau of the Census and the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station. Prior to SMU he had taught at UCLA, Stanford, the Universities of Hawaii, Colorado and Southern California. He held appointments at Monash University (Australia), University of Cape Town (South Africa) and the University of Karlsruhe (Germany).

John was an outstanding theoretician and practitioner of operations research, statistics, and applied mathematics for over 30 years. He was the author of the three volume Handbook of Nonparametric Statistics and of approximately 150 articles in such journals as Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics Quarterly, the Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan, Annals of Mathematical Statistics, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

He was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

John Walsh died of a heart attack in Dublin in 1972 while attending that year’s IFORS meeting.