A W (Freda) Kemp (1930–2022)

After an extended period of declining health, Adrienne Winifred (Freda) Kemp, died on 6 March 2022, aged 91, leaving husband David, four children and six grandchildren. Freda studied Mathematics with Economics at the University of Bristol, graduating in 1951. She then obtained a postgraduate Diploma in Statistics from Oxford University, on a course newly established by David Finney. She also gained another degree in Biology from Oxford, graduating from there in 1953. She met her husband, David, whilst they were both studying on the same course at Bristol. They married in 1952, part way through her time at Oxford. After graduating from Oxford, Freda joined the Grassland Research Station at Hurley, near Maidenhead as an Assistant Statistician. She left in 1956—as was the custom of the time—to start and bring up a family. It was in Hurley that her fascination with discrete distributions was kindled, with the analyses of counts of numbers of plants. In 1963, the family moved to Belfast. Freda returned formally to the academic world in 1964, completing a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast over the next 4 years and then becoming an honorary research fellow. The approach that she took to discrete distributions throughout her life is summed up by her thesis title: ‘Studies in Univariate Discrete Distribution Theory Based on the Generalized Hypergeometric Function and Associated Differential Equations’. Take a general family of special functions, of considerable interest to mathematicians, discover which standard probability distributions can be expressed as members of that family and then use the properties of the family to express relationships between these distributions, to develop new methods of inference about their parameters and methods of generating and simulating from them. The mathematics is always clearly explained and is tied to the real world by Freda’s deep interest in ecology and natural history. In 1970, she and David moved to live in Ilkley and to work at the University of Bradford, David as Professor of Statistics and Freda as an Honorary Research Fellow (lecturer 4 years later). Whilst at Bradford, several of her research students were from Greece and returned there to become senior figures in academia and government. In 1983, Freda and David both took early retirement and moved to St Andrews where both were given honorary research positions within the School of Mathematics and Statistics. Their joint office was soon crammed with research papers, exam materials and books, especially from Freda’s time as a book review editor for The Statistician and much longer for Biometrics. When reviewers were difficult to find, her own brief reviews were highly informed and informative. Freda was totally committed to all levels of statistical education. Long after retirement, she served for 4 years as RSS senior examiner and for 12 years on the Editorial Board of The Statistician. She was a committed attendee at Statistics and Mathematics seminars and at international conferences, at many of which Freda would quietly share her ideas with younger speakers, suggesting new lines of progress. Research publications poured out. The summation of Freda’s work lay in the invitation from Norman Johnson and Sam Kotz to join them in producing a Second Edition of ‘Univariate Discrete Distributions’ (1992). This rewriting and updating, doubling the book in size, was substantially hers. The Third Edition (2005) attracted even greater acclaim. Freda was a keen natural historian and an accomplished artist, principally in drawing. She was also a regular attender at the interdenominational University Chapel in St Andrews.