The Department of Statistical Sciences is saddened to learn of the passing of Professor Emeritus Arthur Pentland Dempster, who died on January 30, 2026, at the age of 96.
Born in Toronto in 1929, Professor Dempster earned his B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto (1952) before completing his Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics at Princeton University (1956). He later joined Harvard University’s newly established Department of Statistics in 1958 and remained there through his transition to emeritus status in 2005, shaping the department’s teaching and research mission and mentoring generations of students.
Professor Dempster’s contributions to theoretical statistics are widely celebrated, including work in Bayesian inference, multivariate statistics, computation, and the development of Dempster–Shafer theory. His 1977 paper with Nan Laird and Don Rubin, “Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data Via the EM Algorithm,” remains among the most-cited papers in the statistical sciences.
Members of our department also remember Arthur’s connection to Toronto and to U of T’s statistical community. He was a longtime friend of Donald A.S. Fraser and visited the department often over the years.
A full obituary is available from Harvard’s Department of Statistics.
Professor Dempster will also be honoured with a session at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Boston at 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 2, 2026.