James Durbin

James Durbin, who lived from 30 June 1923 to 23 June 2012, was a British statistician and econometrician known particularly for his work on time series analysis and serial correlation. Born in Widnes, he studied mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, served in the Army Operational Research Group during the war, and took a postgraduate diploma in mathematical statistics at Cambridge. He joined the London School of Economics in 1950 and was professor of statistics there from 1961 until he retired in 1988. He was president of the International Statistical Institute from 1983 to 1985 and of the Royal Statistical Society from 1986 to 1987, and in 2008 received the society's highest distinction, the Guy Medal in Gold. His last book, Time Series Analysis by State Space Methods, was published by Oxford University Press in May 2012.