Richard David Gill
Born1951 (age 72–73)
NationalityBritish (Since 1951)
Dutch (Since 1996)
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge
Scientific career
InstitutionsUtrecht University
Leiden University
Doctoral studentsSara van de Geer
Mark van der Laan (co-advised by Peter Bickel)

Richard David Gill (born 1951[1]) is a British-Dutch mathematician. He has held academic positions in the Netherlands. As a probability theorist and statistician, Gill has researched counting processes. He is also known for his consulting and advocacy on behalf of alleged victims of statistical misrepresentation, including the reversal of the murder conviction of a Dutch nurse who had been jailed for six years.

Education

Gill studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge (1970–1973), and subsequently followed the Diploma of Statistics course there (1973–1974).[1] He obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1979,[2] with the thesis Censoring and Stochastic Integrals,[1] which was supervised by Jacobus Oosterhoff and Carel Scheffer of the Vrije Universiteit, which awarded the doctorate.[3]

During his career Gill has supervised 24 Ph.D. students including Sara van de Geer and Mark van der Laan.[3]

Gill has said that he was "not much of an activist" as a student, but now feels guilty about not speaking up more at the time about perceived injustices, saying that this is partly because of an incident when working as a statistician in the 1970s when he helped on an experiment that severed the front legs of rats to investigate whether it would lead to the reshaping of their skulls. Gill said that this incident has stayed with him, as "what upset me most is that I didn’t have the strength of character to refuse to do that job".[4]

Career

In 1974[5] Gill was appointed at the Mathematical Centre (later renamed Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, or CWI) of Amsterdam.[6] After receiving his Ph.D., he continued to collaborate with Danish and Norwegian statisticians for ten years, co-authoring Statistical models based on counting processes, by Andersen, Borgan, Gill, and Keiding.[7]

Gill became head of the Department of Mathematical Statistics at CWI in 1983.[8] In 1988, Gill moved to the Department of Mathematics of Utrecht University,[8] where he held the chair in mathematical stochastics. His PhD students include Sara van de Geer,[3] and Mark van der Laan (co-advised by Peter Bickel).[9] In 2006, Gill moved to the Department of Mathematics at Leiden University, where he held the chair of mathematical statistics.[5] He retired from Leiden in 2017.[10]

Gill became a citizen of the Netherlands in 1996.[1]

Advocacy

Gill has lobbied for retrials for nurses whose criminal convictions were based in part on statistical evidence, including Lucia de Berk and Benjamin Geen.[4] Gill also said in a 2021 lecture that he suspects Beverley Allitt is innocent, and in a 2020 paper said the case "deserves fresh study".[11]: 21:35 [12] Gill states that his original involvement in campaigning for nurses stemmed from his wife encouraging him to get involved in the de Berk case, recounting her saying "They’re using statistics; you should get involved, do something useful".[4]

De Berk was sentenced in the Netherlands to life imprisonment in 2003, after a legal psychologist gave testimony that there was great likelihood that de Berk committed a string of murders.[13] Gill and other professional statisticians showed this statistical testimony to be fallacious.[13] Continued scrutiny further invalidated the testimony by showing that the data had been collected to support the conviction of de Berk.[14][15][16] After a campaign in which Gill helped, a retrial was ordered and de Berk was found not guilty; she received a public apology from the Dutch government, which also began negotiating financial compensation.[17][18]

Gill's challenge of statistical evidence played a role in securing Daniela Poggiali's acquittal on murder charges in Italy in 2021.[4][19]

Benjamin Geen's applications for a retrial have been rejected and in 2013 and 2015 Gill and other statisticians asked the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to look into his case. The appeals were unsuccessful.[4][20]

In 2022 Gill contributed to a peer reviewed report from the Royal Statistical Society on statistical issues in investigation of suspected medical misconduct.[21][22]

Since the murder conviction of Lucy Letby in August 2023, Gill has questioned the statistical and scientific evidence in her case, stating, on his personal website: "As a scientist, I am saying that this case is a major miscarriage of justice. Lucy did not have a fair trial. The similarities with the famous case of Lucia de Berk in the Netherlands are deeply disturbing."[23][24]

Honours

Gill is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.[25] He is a past president of the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research.[26] Gill was selected as the 2010–2011 Distinguished Lorentz Fellow by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences.[27][28]

Selected publications

  • Andersen, Per K.; Borgan, Ornulf; Gill, Richard D.; Keiding, Niels (2012). Statistical Models Based on Counting Processes. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-1-4612-4348-9.
  • Baddeley, Adrian J.; Gill, Richard D. (1997). "Kaplan-Meier estimators of distance distributions for spatial point processes". The Annals of Statistics. 25: 263–292. doi:10.1214/aos/1034276629.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Short biography: Richard D. Gill". Leiden University. Retrieved 25 August 2023.
  2. ↑ "Richard D. Gil". ieeexplore.ieee.org. Retrieved 26 September 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 Richard David Gill at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 O'Grady, Cathleen (19 January 2023). "Unlucky numbers: Richard Gill is fighting the shoddy statistics that put nurses in prison for serial murder". Science. Retrieved 26 August 2023.
  5. 1 2 "Richard Gill appointed professor". Leiden University. 6 July 2006. Retrieved 25 September 2023.
  6. ↑ Groeneboom, Piet; van Mill, Jan; van der Vaart, Aad (2017), Statistics as both a purely mathematical activity and an applied science (PDF), vol. 18, Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde, pp. 55–60
  7. ↑ Andersen, Per Kragh; Borgan, Ørnulf; Gill, Richard D.; Keiding, Niels (1993). Statistical models based on counting processes. Springer series in statistics. New York: Springer-Verlag. pp. xii+767. ISBN 978-0-387-97872-7. MR 1198884.
  8. 1 2 "Richard David Gill". ResearchGate. Retrieved 26 September 2023.
  9. ↑ Fan, Jianqing; Ritov, Ya'acov; Wu, CF Jeff, eds. (2012). Selected Works of Peter J. Bickel. Springer Science+Business Media. pp. xxxi–xxxiii. ISBN 9781461455448.
  10. ↑ Gill, Richard. "From killer nurses to quantum entanglement, and back" (PDF). VVSOR - Vereniging voor Statistiek en Operations Research. Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research. Retrieved 27 September 2023.
  11. ↑ Gill, Richard (13 June 2021). "Statistical Issues in Serial Killer Nurse Cases". YouTube. Retrieved 24 September 2023.
  12. ↑ Gill, Richard (14 January 2020), From killer nurses to quantum entanglement, and back (Part 1) (PDF), Leiden University, p. 7
  13. 1 2 Hawkes, Nigel (10 April 2010). "Did statistics damn Lucia de Berk?: Behind the numbers". The Independent.
  14. ↑ Buchanan, Mark (18 January 2007). "Statistics: conviction by numbers" (PDF). Nature. 445 (7125): 254–255. Bibcode:2007Natur.445..254B. doi:10.1038/445254a. PMID 17230166. S2CID 4419275.
  15. ↑ "Persbericht CWI: Hirsch Ballin en Albayrak nemen petitie aan in zaak Lucia de B." [CWI Press Release: Hirsch Ballin and Albayrak accept petition in case of Lucia de B.] (in Dutch). Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica – Amsterdam. 1 November 2007. Archived from the original on 8 April 2008.
  16. ↑ "Deskundige Over Belangrijkste Bewijs In Zaak Lucia De B.: 'Deze Baby Is Niet Vergiftigd'" [Expert on the most important proof in the Lucia de B. case: 'This baby has not been poisoned']. NOVA (in Dutch). 29 September 2007. Archived from the original on 4 October 2008.
  17. ↑ "Nurse Lucia de Berk finally found not guilty of murdering seven patients". 14 April 2010. Archived from the original on 24 July 2011.
  18. ↑ "Apology for nurse jailed for murdering seven patients", AP, The Independent 14 April 2010.
  19. ↑ Reid, Mark (19 April 2022). "Another acquittal: how Richard Gill once again saved a nurse from bad statistics". Mare Online. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  20. ↑ Devlin, Hannah (15 February 2015). "Statisticians question evidence used to convict nurse of murdering patients". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 September 2023.
  21. ↑ O'Grady, Cathleen (19 January 2023), "Unlucky numbers: Fighting murder convictions that rest on shoddy stats", Science, retrieved 26 September 2023
  22. ↑ "RSS publishes report on dealing with uncertainty in medical "murder" cases". RSS. Royal Statistical Society. 26 September 2022. Retrieved 26 September 2023.
  23. ↑ "The Lucy Letby case". Richard Gill Statistics. 24 May 2023. Archived from the original on 1 September 2023. Retrieved 1 September 2023.
  24. ↑ Steafel, Eleanor (24 August 2023). "How internet sleuths are already trying to prove Lucy Letby innocent". The Telegraph. Retrieved 26 August 2023.
  25. ↑ "Richard Gill" (in Dutch). Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 15 July 2015. Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  26. ↑ Board Archived 13 November 2009 at the Wayback Machine, Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research. Accessed 23 January 2010
  27. ↑ Distinguished Lorentz Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.
  28. ↑ Richard Gill Distinguished Lorentz Fellow 2010–2011, News release, Leiden University. Accessed 23 January 2010.
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