William Edwards Deming

Deming got married to Agnes Bell in 1922. They adopted a daughter named Dorothy together but a few years later Bell died.

In 1932, he got married to Lola Elizabeth Shupe, a teacher for mathematics and co-author of his several papers, and the couple had two children together: Diana and Linda.

Deming died in his sleep at the age of 93 in his Washington home on December 20, 1993 due to natural causes.

William Edwards Deming was born on October 14, 1900 in Sioux City, Iowa, to William Albert and Pluma Irene Edwards. His father was an insurance agent and lawyer and his mother was a piano teacher.

His parents were quite well-read, his father had studied mathematics and law and his mother was a learned musician from San Francisco, which is why they always emphasized on Deming’s education.

Deming started his education at the University of Wyoming in 1917, then enrolled at the University of Colorado and then at Yale University, where he finished his studies with the Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics.

Deming edited a series of lectures delivered by Walter A. Shewhart of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, at USDA, ‘Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control’, into a book published in 1939.

In the following year, he developed the sampling techniques that were used for the first time during the 1940 U.S. Census, formulating the Deming-Stephan algorithm for iterative proportional fitting in the process.

He was made the member of the five-man Emergency Technical Committee to work on the compilation of the American War Standards and taught statistical process control techniques to the workers involved in wartime production.

In 1946, Deming joined the staff at New York University’s graduate school of business administration as a professor of statistics. In the following year, he was engaged in early planning for the 1951 Japanese Census.

He became a part of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) and from 1950, he started training hundreds of engineers, managers and scholars in statistical process control (SPC) and concepts of quality.

His work in Japan is considered as the most important contribution of his life. He taught top business managers how to improve service, product quality, testing, and sales by various means, including the application of statistical methods.

His contribution to Japanese economy made him into somewhat a hero in Japan, and he was awarded Deming Japan's Order of the Sacred Treasure, Second Class in 1960.