David L. Wallace *53

David Wallace, professor emeritus of statistics at the University of Chicago, died Oct. 9, 2017, from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 88.

Wallace graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1948 and earned a master’s degree there in 1949. He then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 1953 and joined the statistics faculty at the University of Chicago in 1954, after a year at MIT.

At Chicago, he served as department counselor and chair, and supervised many Ph.D. dissertations. He also was the acting director of the biological computation center for a year, and served on university and laboratory school committees until he retired in 1995. He was an editor of professional journals. He also had been a visiting associate professor at Princeton.

Wallace was involved in the early use of computers in predicting election results. With Frederick Mosteller *46, he wrote Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist. Among his honors, Wallace received the American Statistical Association’s memorial award named for the eminent Samuel S. Wilks, regarded as the father of mathematical statistics at Princeton.

Wallace is survived by his wife of 62 years, Anna Mary; two children; and three granddaughters.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.