Daniel B. DeLURY, 1907-1993

Daniel DeLury attended the University of Toronto and obtained a BA in Mathematics in 1929, an MAin 1930, and a PhD in 1936, also in Mathematics. From 1937 to 1945 he taught at the University of Toronto and developed widely used lecture notes for statistics courses. From 1945 to 1947 DeLury visited the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and from 1947 to 1958 he was Director of the Department of Mathematical Statistics at the Ontario Research Foundation. During his period at the Ontario Research Foundation, DeLury gave a regular graduate course on Statistical Methods in Research in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto. From 1958 until his retirement in 1968, DeLury was Chairman of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, where he took a special interest in developing graduate studies. He became a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Mathematics in 1977 and he is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor DeLury has lived up to his exacting ideal of quality in statistics and has encouraged a wholesome balance between theory and applications in statistics. As a pioneer statistician in the University of Toronto and later as Chairman of the Department of Mathematics, he engendered this same attitude in many statistics graduates in the University of Toronto and in doing so has influenced the development and practice of statistics in many Canadian universities. (For further details see The Mathematics Department in the University of Toronto 1827-1978 by Gilbert de B. Robinson, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto, 1979.)