Edwin Bidwell Wilson

Edwin Bidwell Wilson was an American mathematician, statistician, physicist and general polymath. He was the sole protégé of Yale University physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs and was mentor to MIT economist Paul Samuelson. Wilson had a distinguished academic career at Yale and MIT, followed by a long and distinguished period of service as a civilian employee of the US Navy in the Office of Naval Research. In his latter role, he was awarded the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the highest honorary award available to a civilian employee of the US Navy. Wilson made broad contributions to mathematics, statistics and aeronautics, and is well known for producing a number of widely used textbooks. He is perhaps best known for his derivation of the eponymously named Wilson score interval, which is a confidence interval used widely in statistics. He was also the first managing editor of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).