Interviews with Australian scientists

Professor Christopher Heyde (1939 - 2008)
Statistician

Christopher Charles (Chris) Heyde was born in Sydney in 1939. He attended the University of Sydney where he graduated with a BSc (Hons) in 1961 and MSc in 1962. Heyde then completed a PhD in statistics at the Australian National University in 1965. Heyde then wanted to study abroad, so he took up a position at Michigan State University, East Lansing in 1964. He stayed one year in the USA before accepting a job as a lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the UK. In 1967 Heyde moved to the University of Manchester as a special lecturer in charge of the Statistical Laboratory. Heyde returned to Australia in 1968 taking up a readership at the Australian National University's Department of Statistics. In 1975 Heyde joined the CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics as a senior principal research scientist (1975-77), chief research scientist (1977-81) and acting chief (1981-83). Heyde's next move was to the University of Melbourne in 1983 as professor and chairman of the Department of Statistics. Heyde returned to the Australian National University to become head of the Department of Statistics in the Institute of Advanced Studies (1986-88). From 1993, he was also a professor of statistics at Columbia University, New York. Heyde held both of these positions until his death in 2008.

Interviewed by Professor Paul Glasserman and Professor Steve Kou in 2003 for the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and interviewed by Professor Steve Kou and Professor Sidney Resnick in 2004 for the Archives of the American Statistical Association, Distinguished Statisticians Series.

More information about Professor Heyde is available on the Academy's website at
Biographical memoirs – Christopher Heyde, 1939-2008

Reproduced with the kind permission of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
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