Biography
Geoffrey S. Watson was born in 1921 in Bendigo, a rural community in the state of Victoria, Australia. He was an Australian statistician who spent the majority of his career in North America (USA and Canada), with shorter periods in Australia and the UK. He received a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from the University of Melbourne (1942) and a PhD in statistics from North Carolina State University (1951). He wrote his PhD thesis while visiting Cambridge University in the UK and, while there, he worked with James Durbin of the London School of Economics. Together they published companion papers in 1950 and 1951 in the journal Biometrika, on what is now called the Durbin-Watson statistic. It is used to test the presence of serial correlation in data observed at equal time intervals and is a fundamental component of most time series software packages. Generalizing from time series to spatial data brings attention to the variogram at its closest spatial lag: If this value is...
Bibliography
Durbin J, Watson GS (1950) Testing for serial correlation in least squares regression, I. Biometrika 37:409–428
Durbin J, Watson GS (1951) Testing for serial correlation in least squares regression, II. Biometrika 38:159–178
Mardia KV (ed) (1992) The Art of Statistical Science: A Tribute to G.S. Watson. Wiley, Chichester
Watson GS (1983) Statistics on Spheres. Wiley, New York
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Cressie, N., Crawford, C.A.G. (2021). Watson, Geoffrey S.. In: Daya Sagar, B.S., Cheng, Q., McKinley, J., Agterberg, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematical Geosciences. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26050-7_369-1
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