Maurice Priestley

{{Short description|Statistician (1933–2013)}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=December 2023}}

{{Use British English|date=December 2013}}

{{Infobox scientist

| name = Maurice Priestley

| image =

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| birth_date = {{birth date|1933|3|15|df=y}}

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| death_date = {{death date and age|2013|6|15|1933|3|15|df=y}}

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| nationality = British

| fields = Statistics

| workplaces = University of Manchester

| alma_mater = University of Manchester

| doctoral_advisor = M. S. Bartlett

| doctoral_students = Howell Tong

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Maurice Bertram Priestley (15 March 1933 – 15 June 2013Tata Subba Rao and Granville Tunnicliffe-Wilson, Obituary: Maurice Priestley 1933–2013, [http://bulletin.imstat.org/2013/08/obituary-maurice-priestley-1933%E2%80%932013/ IMS Bulletin on line] 29 August 2013) was a professor of statistics in the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester, England. He gained his first degree at the University of Cambridge and went on to gain a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester.

He was known especially for his work on time series analysis, especially spectral analysis and wavelet analysis.MB Priestley,

Spectral Analysis and Time Series (Vols. 1 & 2). London: Academic Press, 1981. {{ISBN|978-0-12-564901-8}} He was a longstanding editor of the Journal of Time Series Analysis, a special edition of which was published in his honour in 1993.Tata Subba Rao, editor, Developments in time series analysis: in honour of Maurice B. Priestley, London, Chapman and Hall, 1993. {{ISBN|978-0-412-49260-0}}

Less well-known but equally important was his work with M.T. Chao on nonparametric function fitting.