Tim Gregoire, Kim Iles, George Furnival and John Bell

George Furnival
1925 - 2009

Monday the 18th, 2009, George Furnival passed away at age 84. Many of you who have come to the Western Mensuration meetings in the last few years had the pleasure of meeting George. He was a classmate of John Bell, who took the forest measurements class with him at Duke University. He was a lovely gentleman, and admired by all. We will miss him. The Dean of Forestry and Environmental Sciences at Yale sent out the following announcement:

I write with the very sad news that George Mason Furnival, J.P. Weyerhaeuser, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Forest Management passed away yesterday morning. George received his Doctor of Forestry from Duke University, where he studied under F.X. Schumacher. He is best known for his work in computational biometrics. His paper “Regressions by leaps and bounds,'” provided a regression algorithm that was incorporated into numerous statistical software packages. The original paper was recently republished by Technometrics as one of the best 10 papers in the journal's history. In forestry, George is famous for his “Furnival index”, which is used to determine the best regression model when the choice among candidates is confused by different transformations. George has also made important contributions in forest management, statistical ecology, and perhaps most notably, to statistical sampling. At F&ES, George is remembered for his patient and clear statistical advice to both students and faculty. But it can also be said that he was also patient and clear to biometricians around the world. George was generous with his research ideas, and his students and colleagues readily admit that the key ideas in some of their most famous papers came from George.

You can find an older article on George here.