Jerzy Neyman (
April 16, 1894–
August 5, 1981), born
Jerzy Splawa-Neyman, was a Polish-American mathematician and statistician.
He was born into a Polish family in Bendery, Bessarabia in Imperial Russia, the fourth of four children of Czeslaw Splawa-Neyman and Kazimiera Lutoslawska. His family was Roman Catholic and Neyman served as an altar boy during his early childhood. Later, Neyman would become an agnostic. Neyman's family descended from a long line of Polish nobles and military heroes. He graduated from the Kamianets-Podilskyi gubernial gymnasium for boys in 1909 under the name Yuri Cheslavovich Neyman.[1] He began studies at Kharkov University in 1912, where he was taught by Russian probabilist Sergei Natanovich Bernstein. After he read 'Lessons on the integration and the research of the primitive functions' by Henri Lebesgue, he was fascinated with measure and integration.
In 1921 he returned to Poland in a program of repatriation of POWs after the Polish-Soviet War. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree at University of Warsaw in 1924. He was examined by Waclaw Sierpinski and Stefan Mazurkiewicz, among others. He spent a couple of years in London and Paris on a fellowship to study statistics with Karl Pearson and Émile Borel. After his return to Poland he established the Biometric Laboratory at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw.
He published many books dealing with experiments and statistics, and devised the way which the FDA tests medicines today.
