Kendall, Maurice was born in 1907 in Kettering, Northamptonshire, England. He studied Mathematics at St. John's College, Cambridge. After graduation as a Mathematics Wrangler in 1929, he joined the British Civil Service in the Ministry of Agriculture. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1934.
In 1937, he worked with G. Udny Yule in the revision of his standard statistical textbook, Introduction to the Theory of Statistics. He also work on the rank correlation coefficient which bears his name, Kendall's tau, which eventually led to a monograph on Rank Correlation in 1948.
In 1938 and 1939 he began work, along with Bernard Babington Smith, on the problem of random number generation, developing both one of the first early mechanical devices to produce random digits, and formulated a series of tests such as frequency test, serial test and a poker test, for statistical randomness in a given set of digits.
During the war he managed to produce volume one of the Advanced Theory of...
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag
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(2008). Kendall, Maurice George. In: The Concise Encyclopedia of Statistics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-32833-1_210
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