Alexander Aitken

Alexander Craig "Alec" Aitken was one of New Zealand's most eminent mathematicians. In a 1935 paper he introduced the concept of generalized least squares, along with now standard vector/matrix notation for the linear regression model. Another influential paper co-authored with his student Harold Silverstone established the lower bound on the variance of an estimator, now known as Cramér–Rao bound. He was elected to the Royal Society of Literature for his World War I memoir, Gallipoli to the Somme.