Professor Sir John Kingman

Sir John has been an honorary fellow since 1988.   He entered Pembroke in 1957 to read mathematics and was elected a junior research fellow in 1961.   He left Cambridge in 1965 to join the new University of Sussex, and after professorships there and in Oxford became chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council in 1981.   From 1985 to 2001 he was vice-chancellor of the University of Bristol, after which he returned to Cambridge and to Pembroke as director of the Isaac Newton Institute.

His research lies in the mathematical theory of probability and its application to fields such as operational research and population genetics.   He gave the first (and worst) proof of the subadditive ergodic theorem, and introduced the Poisson-Dirichlet distribution and the coalescent which are widely used in modern genomics.   He was elected to the Royal Society in 1971 and received its Royal Medal in 1983.   He is an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Sir John has served as president of the Royal Statistical Society, the London Mathematical Society and the European Mathematical Society.   He has been a non-executive director of public companies such as IBM UK, SmithKline Beecham and the British Technology Group.   In 2000 he was the founding chairman of the Statistics Commission, the precursor of today's UK Statistics Authority.
In 1964 he married the historian Valerie Cromwell, later director of the History of Parliament Trust and high sheriff of Bristol.   Their son, also now Sir John, was the first chair of UK Research and Innovation, and their daughter Charlotte is a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist.   Lady Kingman died in 2018 and Sir John lives in retirement in Bristol.