Thomas H. Leonard

Thomas Hoskyns Leonard (born 1948) is a British statistician. Originally from Devon, he studied for and obtained a doctorate in Statistics at the University of London. He went on to work at the University of Warwick and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before taking up the Chair of Statistics at the University of Edinburgh. Retiring in 2001, he still lives in Edinburgh and continues to write on and engage with statistics.^[1]

Leonard has published on the Bayesian approach to categorical data analysis, as well as on function smoothing and prior informative density estimation, conditional Laplacian approximations for marginal inference and prediction, and the statistical modelling of log covariance matrices. He is also known for his work concerning the applications of Bayesian methodology in geophysics, medicine, psychometrics and the provision of statistical expertise in legal cases.^[2] He was one of the founders, in 1992, of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, alongside Arnold Zellner and Gordon Kaufman,^[3] and has published a history of the Bayesian approach.^[4]

Notes

References

• Leonard, Thomas H. (2014), "A Personal History of Bayesian Statistics", Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics 6:2, pp. 80–115 
• ISBA History and Meetings
• A personal history of Bayesian statistics, by Thomas H. Leonard (StatsLife)
• The Life of a Bayesian Boy: An interview with Thomas Hoskyns Leonard (Statistics Views)