Daniel Dugué

Daniel Dugué was a French mathematician specializing in probability and statistics. He was born on 22 September 1912 in Saint-Louis in Senegal and died on 10 September 1987 in Paris, France. After finishing high-school studies in Bordeaux, Daniel Dugué was admitted to ENS and with a degree agrégation de mathématiques when he was 21 years old, in 1933. He defended the doctoral dissertation in mathematics when he was 25 years old under the supervision of Georges Darmois and defended it before Émile Borel and Arnaud Denjoy. In the course of his thesis, Dugué proves several theorems in the theory of the maximum likelihood estimation combining results and tools from probability theory, such as those of Khinchin, Kolmogorov, and Doob with Fisher's theory of the maximum likelihood estimator. In 1937, Fisher invites Dugué to work with him in London, and Dugué spends two years as a Rockefeller fellow in London. He subsequently contributed to the development of the rigorous theory of the maximum likelihood estimator. He also worked with Yuri Linnik on the decomposition of probability distributions. Dugué succeeded Georges Darmois as a director of Paris Institute of Statistics in 1960 leading it until his retirement in 1981. He was married to Lucie Canaud and had four children, Catherine, Élisabeth, David and Marc. He died from illness in 1987. Jérôme Ponti Prize (1946) Montyon Prize (1947) Application des propriétés de la limite au sens du calcul des probabilités à l’étude de diverses questions d’estimation, Thesis, Faculté des sciences de Paris, 1937. Analycité et convexité des fonctions caractéristiques, in: Généralisations de la loi de probabilité de Laplace, 56 pages, Paris, Institut Henri-Poincaré, 1951. Arithmétique des lois de probabilités, 50 pages, Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1957. Fonctions connexes de Polya, avec Maurice Girault, 302 pages, Paris, Institut Henri-Poincaré, 1957. Statistique et psychologie, 4 fascicules de 48, 52, 25 et 38 pages, Paris, Institut Henri-Poincaré, 1957.