Either side of the First World War (when he served in the Black Watch regiment), Wishart studied mathematics and physics at Edinburgh U. In 1924 he joined Karl Pearson at UCL, moving in 1927 to join Sir Ronald Fisher at Rothamsted. His work on the Wishart distribution appeared in 1928. In 1931 he moved to Cambridge U, where he supervised Bartlett, Cochran, and Hartley, and became Head of the Statistical Laboratory in 1953. He was elected FRSE in 1931.

http://biomet.oxfordjournals.org/content/44/1-2/1.full.pdf Biography.