Anthony C. Davison

Anthony Christopher Davison (born 28 February 1958)^[1] is a British mathematical statistician and educator. He made seminal contributions to extreme value theory, likelihood inference and environmental statistics.^[2][3]

Anthony Christopher Davison
Born	(1958-02-28) 28 February 1958 (age 67) London, United Kingdom
Academic background
Education	St. John's College, University of Oxford (B.A. 1980) Imperial College London (MSc 1981, PhD 1984)
Doctoral advisors	Helen ApSimon Richard L. Smith
Academic work
Discipline	Statistics
Institutions	University of Texas at Austin University of Oxford EPFL
Doctoral students	Valérie Chavez-Demoulin
Website	https://people.epfl.ch/anthony.davison

Education and career

Davison was born in London. He attended the Warwick School, followed by the St. John's College, University of Oxford, where he obtained a B.A. in mathematics in 1980. He then studied at the Imperial College London and obtained a MSc in statistics in 1981 with a project supervised by Martin Beale. He went on the obtain a PhD in statistics in 1984 at the Imperial College London under the supervision of environmental scientist Helen ApSimon and statistician Richard L. Smith. Between 1984 and 1986, Davison was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States. He was a lecturer at the Department of Mathematics at the Imperial College London from 1986 to 1989, and a university lecturer at the University of Oxford from 1989 to 1996.^[1]

Davison joined École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland in 1996 as a professor of statistics. He became the chair of the statistics department.^[1] In 2021, Davison, Holger Rootzén and other published work using the longevity data and extreme value theory to predict the age limit of humans.^[4][5][6]. Davison retired from EPFL in June 2025^[7].

Honours and awards

Davison was awarded the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society in 2015.^[8] He gave the Medallion lecture of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2018.^[9] He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Statistical Institute.^[3]

Bibliography

• Davison, A. C.; Hinkley, D. V. (28 October 1997). Bootstrap Methods and their Application. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511802843. ISBN 978-0-521-57391-7.
• Davison, A. C. (4 August 2003). Statistical Models. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511815850. ISBN 978-0-521-77339-3.
• Davison, Anthony Christopher; Dodge, Yadolah; Wermuth, Nanny, eds. (2005). Celebrating statistics: papers in honour of Sir David Cox on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Oxford statistical science series. Oxford (GB): Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-856654-0.
• Brazzale, A. R.; Davison, A. C.; Reid, N. (31 May 2007). Applied Asymptotics: Case Studies in Small-Sample Statistics. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511611131. ISBN 978-0-521-84703-2.