Kruskal was co-author (with Wallis) of the 1952 paper that introduced one of the best-known non-parametric tests. He was educated at Harvard U and Columbia U (where his PhD was supervised by Scheffé and Levene). He joined the Statistics Department at U Chicago in 1950, where he worked with Goodman and Wallis. A nice quote is ‘Each of us has been doing statistics all his life, in the sense that each of us has been busily reaching conclusions based on empirical observations ever since birth’. He was Editor of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics during 1958–61. He was President of the IMS in 1971 and was its Rietz Lecturer in 1979. He was the 1978 COPSS Fisher Lecturer. He was President of the ASA in 1982, having been presented with its Wilks Award in 1978. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the RSS in 1989.

http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.ss/1177010498 Fuller biography, interview, and photographs.