ORSA President, 1963
Alexander Mood was the 12th President of ORSA. Mood was a renowned was a statistician trained at Princeton under the renowned statistician, Samuel Wilks, had previously been President of the American Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1957).
After working for the National Defense Research Council (NDRC) for most of World War II, he joined the Iowa State faculty in 1945 to join its Stat Lab. Within a few years he had founded a separate Statistics Department. In 1950 he published the famous Introduction to the Theory of Statistics that wnet through several editions and was studied by graduate students for two decades. It was also in 1950 that Mood moved to The RAND Corporation in Santa Monica where he was deputy to John Williams, head of the Mathematics Department and deeply engaged in O.R. Five years later, Mood formed General Analysis Corporation to work on Government projects. .The firm was eventually sold to CEIR Inc. In 1964, Mood went to the Office of Education as Assistant Commissioner. There he organized the National Center for Educational Statistics and computerized the agency. He also supervised the Coleman Report on the state of integration in the public schools, the second largest social science undertaken to that time. Mood closed his career at the University of California at Irvine (1967-75) where he was the founder and head of the Public Policy Research Organization and a Professor of Management.
He was awarded the prestigious Wilks Memorial Award of the American Statistical Society in 1979 "for his many significant contributions to the theory of statistics, an outstanding textbook on the subject, his extensive applications to operations and systems analysis, and unique statistical assessments of education and public policy research".
Alexander Mood died in 2009.
BA (Physics), 1934, Texas-Austin; PhD (Statistics), 1940, Princeton