Wishart was born at 24 Melville Lane in
Montrose, Scotland on 28 November 1898, the son of Elizabeth Millar Scott of Edinburgh and John Wishart of
Montrose. His father was a bespoke boot and shoe maker. He was educated at
Perth Academy. In the
First World War he was conscripted into the
Black Watch in 1917 and served two years in France. He studied mathematics at the
University of Edinburgh under
Edmund Taylor Whittaker, graduating with an MA and BSc. He then went on to study at the
University of Cambridge where he gained a further MA. He then gained a doctorate (DSc) at the
University College London under
Karl Pearson. After a year of teacher training at
Moray College of Education in Edinburgh he then worked for two years as a Mathematics Teacher at West Leeds High School. In 1927 he joined
Rothamsted Experimental Station with
Ronald Fisher, and then (from 1931) as a Reader in Statistics in the
University of Cambridge where he became the first Director of the
Statistical Laboratory in 1953. He was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1931, his proposers being
Edmund Taylor Whittaker,
Malcolm Laurie,
Alexander Craig Aitken and
Robert Schlapp. He edited
Biometrika from 1937. In 1950 he was elected as a
Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He first formulated a generalised product-moment distribution named the
Wishart distribution in his honour, in 1928. In the
Second World War he first served as a Captain in the
Intelligence Corps then in 1942 became assistant secretary at the
Admiralty. Wishart drowned at the age of 57 on 14th July 1956, having suffered a stroke while swimming in the sea at Revolcadero Beach,
Acapulco. He was in Acapulco as a representative of the
Food and Agriculture Organization, and on a mission to set up a research centre. ==Publications==