Joseph Gastwirth

Joseph Lewis Gastwirth (born August 31, 1938) is an American statistician and Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Economics at George Washington University. He is known for his work on measuring economic inequality, including the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient.[1]

He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.[2]

Early life and education

Gastwirth was born in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1958 with a B.S. in Mathematics. He earned an M.A. in Pure Mathematics from Princeton University in 1960 and a Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics from Columbia University in 1963.[3]

Career

In 1964, Gastwirth joined Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of Statistics and was promoted to associate professor in 1967.[4]

In 1971, Gastwirth served as Visiting Faculty Advisor to the Office of Statistical Policy within the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President.[3] He joined George Washington University as Professor of Statistics and Economics in 1972. He retired in January 2024.[3]

Research

Gastwirth in his 1971 paper in Econometrica provided a rigorous general definition of the Lorenz curve, and his work derived robust estimators and asymptotic theory for the Gini coefficient and related indices from grouped data.[5] He has also introduced median-based and middle-class-focused measures of inequality to supplement the Gini coefficient.[6] In collaboration with researchers at the National Institutes of Health, Gastwirth adapted these measures to the study of health disparities.[7][8]

Gastwirth's two-volume treatise Statistical Reasoning in Law and Public Policy, published by Academic Press in 1988, addresses the use of statistical reasoning in legal and public-policy contexts. He also edited the volume Statistical Science in the Courtroom, published by Springer in 2000.[9]

His work has been cited in federal court decisions and in government guidance from the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, including guidance on practical significance issued on July 23, 2019, and rules and procedures for investigating and resolving discrimination issues published in the Federal Register in 2020.[10]

Cases citing his work include Vuyanich v. Republic National Bank, Apsley v. Boeing, and Chamberlin v. Fisher, 885 F.3d 832 (5th Cir. 2018).[9]

Gastwirth developed statistical methods for estimating the prevalence of rare diseases using group testing while preserving the anonymity of subjects, with early applications to HIV/AIDS antibody prevalence in blood donors.[11]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

  • Gastwirth, J. L. (1966). "On Robust Procedures". Journal of the American Statistical Association. 61: 929–948.
  • Chernoff, H.; Gastwirth, J. L.; Johns, M. V. Jr. (1967). "Asymptotic Distribution of Linear Combinations of Functions of Order Statistics with Application to Estimation". Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 38: 52–72.
  • Gastwirth, J. L. (1971). "A General Definition of the Lorenz Curve". Econometrica. 39: 1037–1038.
  • Gastwirth, J. L. (1972). "Robust Estimation of the Lorenz Curve and Gini Index". Review of Economics and Statistics. 54: 306–316.
  • Gastwirth, J. L.; Hammick, P. A. (1989). "Estimation of the Prevalence of a Rare Disease, Preserving the Anonymity of the Subjects by Group Testing: Application to Estimating the Prevalence of AIDS Antibodies in Blood Donors". Journal of Statistical Inference and Planning. 22: 15–27.

References

  1. ↑ "Joseph Gastwirth - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
  2. ↑ "Joseph Lewis Gastwirth". Open Library. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
  3. 1 2 3 "Gastwirth, Joseph L. | Department of Statistics | Columbian College of Arts & Sciences | The George Washington University". Department of Statistics | Columbian College of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
  4. ↑ "Joseph Gastwirth". sciencedirect.
  5. ↑ Gastwirth, Joseph L. (1972). "The Estimation of the Lorenz Curve and Gini Index". The Review of Economics and Statistics. 54 (3): 306–316. doi:10.2307/1937992. ISSN 0034-6535.
  6. ↑ Spruill, Nancy L.; Gastwirth, Joseph L. (1982). "On the Estimation of the Correlation Coefficient from Grouped Data". Journal of the American Statistical Association. 77 (379): 614–620. doi:10.2307/2287724. ISSN 0162-1459.
  7. ↑ Gastwirth, Joseph (1992-12-01). "Employment Discrimination: A Statistician's Look at Analysis of Disparate Impact Claims". Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality. 11 (1): 151. doi:10.24926/25730037.342. ISSN 0737-089X.
  8. ↑ "Wealth Inequality Escalation | Joseph Gastwirth". Stats + Stories. 2021-10-14. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
  9. 1 2 Gastwirth, Joseph L. (2020-03-09). "The Role of Statistical Evidence in Civil Cases". Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application. 7 (1): 39–60. doi:10.1146/annurev-statistics-031219-041238. ISSN 2326-8298.
  10. ↑ Pearl, Judea (2022-03-04), "Direct and Indirect Effects", Probabilistic and Causal Inference: The Works of Judea Pearl, vol. 36 (1 ed.), New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 373–392, arXiv:1301.2300, doi:10.1145/3501714.3501736, ISBN 978-1-4503-9586-1, retrieved 2026-08-20{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  11. ↑ Rahme, Elham; Joseph, Lawrence (1998). "Estimating the Prevalence of a Rare Disease: Adjusted Maximum Likelihood". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series D (The Statistician). 47 (1): 149–158. ISSN 0039-0526.
  12. 1 2 "Festschrift for Professor Joseph L. Gastwirth" (PDF). archive.intlpress.com.
  13. ↑ "JSM 2024 Program". ww2.amstat.org. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
  14. 1 2 "Honored IMS Fellows". imstat.org.
  15. ↑ "Guggenheim Fellowships" (PDF). ams.org.
  16. ↑ "The Shiskin Award". nabe.com.
  17. ↑ "Gottfried E. Noether Awards". amstat.org.
  18. ↑ "Joseph Gastwirth Receives Karl E. Peace Award for Betterment of Society". Amstat News. Archived from the original on 2020-01-24. Retrieved 2026-08-20.
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