Biography:K. O. Bowman
Kimiko Osada Bowman (born 1927 – 13 January 2019)[1] was a Japanese-American statistician known for her work on approximating the probability distribution of maximum likelihood estimators and for her advocacy for people with disabilities.[2]
Life
Kimiko Osada was born in Japan in 1927 before emigrating to the United States in 1951. She became a U.S. citizen in 1958.[1]
She contracted polio while young, and became paralyzed from the neck down, but learned to walk again through years of physical therapy.[2]
She began her undergraduate studies in home economics at Radford College, but was persuaded by the college president to become a scientist. She studied both mathematics and chemistry, and completed a B.S.Ed. in mathematics in 1960.[2][3] She earned a PhD in mathematical statistics from Virginia Tech in 1963; her dissertation, advised by Leonard Shenton, was Moments to Higher Orders for Maximum Likelihood Estimates with an Application to the Negative Binomial Distribution.[2][3][4]
She worked as a senior research scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, from which she retired in 1994. She has also frequently visited Japan in association with the U.S. Office of Naval Research.[2][3]
Awards and honors
Bowman became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1976.[5][2] She was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.[2]
In 1987, she was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Tokyo,[3] becoming the first foreigner to be so honored.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Morris, Max. "Obituary: Kimiko Bowman, 1927–2019". https://imstat.org/2019/05/15/obituary-kimiko-bowman-1927-2019/. Retrieved 13 April 2020.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Snider, Val (September 2008), "Never Say Never: Bowman Helps Provide Formula for Approximating the Distribution of Maximum Likelihood Estimators", Amstat News (American Statistical Association): 4–6, https://ww2.amstat.org/about/statisticiansinhistory/index.cfm?fuseaction=biosinfo&BioID=42
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Kimiko O. Bowman, Retired Senior Research Staff Member, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, October 27, 2005, http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~bowman/, retrieved 2017-10-22
- ↑ K. O. Bowman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ Fellows list, American Statistical Association, http://www.amstat.org/ASA/Your-Career/Awards/ASA-Fellows-list.aspx, retrieved 2017-10-22
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