DEMING, W. EDWARDS

born Oct. 14, 1900, Sioux City, Iowa, U.S. died Dec. 20, 1993, Washington, D.C. in full William Edwards Deming American statistician, educator, and consultant whose advocacy of quality-control methods in industrial production aided Japan's economic recovery after World War II and its subsequent rise to global supremacy in many industries in the late 20th century. The son of a small-town lawyer, Deming attended the University of Wyoming (B.S., 1921), University of Colorado (M.S., 1924), and Yale University (Ph.D. in mathematical physics, 1928). He then taught physics at several universities, worked as a mathematical physicist at the United States Department of Agriculture (192739), and was a statistical adviser for the U.S. Census Bureau (193945). From 1946 to 1993 he was a professor of statistics at New York University's graduate school of business administration, and he taught at Columbia University. He also was a research consultant for private business. Deming became interested in the use of statistical analysis to achieve better quality control in industry in the 1930s, and in 1950 he was invited to Japan by Japanese business leaders to teach that nation's executives and engineers about the new methods. Deming's ideas were eagerly adopted by Japanese companies, whose commitment to quality control helped Japanese products to eventually dominate the market in many parts of the world. Japan's Deming Prize (established 1951), which is given annually to major corporations who win a rigorous quality-control competition, is named for Deming. In the 1980s Deming's ideas were taken up by American corporations as they sought to compete more effectively against foreign manufacturers. Deming's quality-control methods centred on systematically tallying product defects, analyzing their causes, correcting the latter, and then recording the effects of the corrections on subsequent product quality.