James O. Ramsay

In retirement, as of 2010, he continued to hold adjunct appointments at Department of Chemical Engineering, Queen's University and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa.

In 1998, the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) awarded him a gold medal for research in 1998. In 2012 the SCS awarded him with an honorary membership. He was president of the Psychometric Society in 1981–1982 and president of the SSC in 2002–2003. Over his career, "three of his papers were read to the Royal Statistical Society, and another won The Canadian Journal of Statistics 2000 Best Paper Award."

Upon graduating in 1964, his mentor, psychometrician Stephen M. Hunka encouraged him to apply to graduate programs at Berkeley, Illinois, and Princeton; with his relatively weak background in mathematics, he was surprised to be accepted by all three. He chose Princeton where he had a "hefty fellowship" from the Educational Testing Service (ETS). At Princeton, his formal supervisor was Harold Gulliksen. Ramsay's Princeton dissertation (1966) concerned MDS, "formalizing seminal contributions to the mathematical formulation" by Joseph Kruskal. During his time at Princeton, he had regular contact with research scientists at Bell Labs, including Joseph Kruskal, John Chambers (creator of the S programming language; core member of the R programming language project), and Douglas Carroll, a leading psychometrician of the era.

James O. Ramsay (born 5 September 1942) is a Canadian statistician and Professor Emeritus at McGill University, Montreal, who developed much of the statistical theory behind multidimensional scaling (MDS). Together with co-author Bernard Silverman, he is widely recognized as the founder of functional data analysis. He wrote four influential books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles in statistical and psychometric journals.

James Ramsay was born in Prince George, British Columbia on 5 September 1942, but didn't reside there long. In his early years, the family spent time in Smithers, British Columbia, Richdale, Alberta, Flaxcombe, Saskatchewan, and Wainwright, Alberta. His father worked as a telegrapher on the Canadian National Railway.

With his background in English literature, Ramsay has long been an inveterate reader. Ramsay's favourite fiction author is George Eliot. "In my mind she stands head and shoulders above everybody else in the whole field of English literature, the giant among giants." His favourite biography concerns Sir William Osler, born in rural Ontario, Canada in 1849, who went on to become one of the four founding fathers of Johns Hopkins Hospital, and made pioneering contributions to the system of medical residency.