Norman S. Matloff

Norman Saul Matloff (December 16, 1948 – June 12, 2026) was an American computer scientist, statistician and professor at the University of California, Davis. His work included probability, statistics, data security, parallel computing, machine learning, and statistical computing in R. He was the author of books on R, Python, debugging, parallel computing, probability and statistics, and regression and classification. Matloff also wrote and testified on employment, immigration, affirmative action, age discrimination and technology labor policy. == Early life and education == Matloff was born in Los Angeles and grew up in East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. His father was an immigrant from Lithuania, and Matloff grew up in a household in which his parents spoke Yiddish to each other. He attended Cal Poly Pomona, majoring in mathematics and minoring in economics. Matloff took his first programming course as a freshman in 1966. He then entered the Ph.D. program in mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he worked in abstract probability theory and functional analysis with Thomas M. Liggett. According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, he received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1975 with the dissertation Equilibrium Behavior in an Infinite Voting Model. Matloff also described statisticians Thomas S. Ferguson and Olive Jean Dunn as important influences on his later views about statistical significance testing. == Academic career == Matloff joined the UC Davis faculty in 1975 after completing his doctorate at UCLA. At the time, the UC Davis Department of Mathematics included an informal statistics subgroup. Matloff and others helped form the UC Davis Department of Statistics in 1979, then organized as an intercollegiate division. During the rise of personal computing, Matloff took a one-year leave to work in Silicon Valley. He returned to UC Davis in fall 1980 with a joint appointment involving statistics and electrical and computer engineering. He later participated in the establishment of the Division of Computer Science within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; the division became the UC Davis Department of Computer Science in 1989. In 2023 he retired after 48 years on the UC Davis faculty, while stating that he intended to continue research, writing books and developing software. He remained active as a professor emeritus. == Research and writing == Matloff's early research grew out of his dissertation in probability theory. He published papers in The Annals of Probability and Zeitschrift fur Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie und Verwandte Gebiete based on that work. His experience as a statistical consultant for Kaiser Permanente led to a paper in Biometrika on the asymptotics of averaged regression functions, which he later described as influential on much of his subsequent work. After moving into computer science, Matloff worked on parallel computation, data security and machine learning, often drawing on