Adrienne W. Kemp
Adrienne Winifred "Freda" Kemp (1930–2022) was a British mathematical statistician who specialized in discrete probability distributions, including the Hermite distribution.
She earned a mathematics degree with economics from the University of Bristol in 1951, then studied statistics and biology at the University of Oxford, earning a diploma in statistics and a biology degree in 1953. At Oxford she met David Kemp; they married in 1952.
Kemp worked as an assistant statistician at the Grassland Research Station in Hurley, Berkshire until 1956, when she left to raise a family of four. Her early work at the station sparked an interest in how discrete distributions can be used to study plants.
In 1953 the family moved to Belfast. In 1954 she began a PhD at Queen's University Belfast, which she completed in 1968. She later became an honorary research fellow there. Her doctoral thesis was Studies in Univariate Discrete Distribution Theory Based on the Generalized Hypergeometric Function and Associated Differential Equations.
In 1970 the family moved to Ilkley and the University of Bradford, where her husband was a professor of statistics and she served as an honorary fellow. She became a lecturer there in 1974.
The couple retired in 1983 and moved to St Andrews, Scotland, where Adrienne held an honorary research position in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews. In retirement she continued to publish and edit as a statistician. She contributed to the textbook Univariate Discrete Distributions, and in the 1992 second edition a large new section was added that was largely hers.
Adrienne Kemp died on 6 March 2022 after a long illness. In 2024 a workshop in her memory, the Workshop on Discrete Distributions In Memory of Adrienne Freda Kemp, was held at Harokopio University in Athens.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:50 (CET).