My father, Henry Wynn, who has died of cancer aged 79, was a professor of statistics at the London School of Economics for the past 20 years, and a former president of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS).
As a statistician, Henry played a key role in major advances in experimental design. These included the classical Wynn-Fedorov algorithm and the development of fundamental statistical formulations for the design of computer experiments that are now routinely used to study physical phenomena such as weather and the climate.
Henry was also a radical. In 1968 he led a delegation to support the Paris students who participated in civil unrest. And in the summer of 1977, Henry, then a lecturer at Imperial College London, challenged the nomination for president of the RSS and went on to win the election. Previous presidents had always been nominated and returned unopposed. This was the first – and last – time a nomination had been challenged.
Later, at LSE, he was a leader of a campaign to abolish the retirement age for academics. The eventual change in the law was just too late for him to benefit, although he remained at LSE as emeritus professor and held a part-time research post at the Alan Turing Institute.
Born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, Henry was the son of Margaret (nee Moxon), a writer on social policy, and Arthur Wynn, director of the Safety in Mines Research Establishment, who worked on mining accident data with the statistician Egon Pearson. After the family moved to London, Henry went to Westminster school, then gained a BA in mathematics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 1967. He was proud of being one of the first students in the newly established modernist college.
After completing his PhD at Imperial, his first job was for the Government Statistical Service (1971-72), after which he returned to Imperial as a lecturer and reader (1972-85). He was then professor of statistics at City University, London (1985-95), and Warwick, before joining LSE as professor and head of the statistics department.
Henry continued his research beyond retirement, publishing widely, with more than 300 papers to his name. He was awarded the RSS Guy medal in silver in 1982 and the George Box medal of the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics in 2011.
Henry was also a much-loved mentor to new generations. In his book Against Sacrifice (2021), he ends with reinforcing the need to better value life itself and the human qualities of empathy and imagination.
Henry married Sandy Johnson, a charity director, in 1969, and they had two children, Robin and me. That marriage ended in divorce.
He is survived by his second wife, Jan Baldwin, a photographer, whom he married in 1988, and by Robin and Me.
