Herman Chernoff (born July 1, 1923) is an American applied mathematician, statistician and physicist. He was formerly a professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford, and MIT, currently emeritus at Harvard University.^[1][2]

Herman Chernoff's parents were Pauline and Max Chernoff, Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. He studied at Townsend Harris High School^[2] and earned a B.S. in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1943.^[3] He attended graduate school at Brown University, earning an M.Sc. in applied mathematics in 1945, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1948 under the supervision of Abraham Wald.^[3][4]

Chernoff became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974,^[5] and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980.^[6] In 1987, he was selected for the Wilks Memorial Award by the American Statistical Association,^[7] and in 2012, he was made an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[8]

Herman Chernoff's met his future wife, Judith, when they were both graduate students at Brown University in 1945, and married her in 1947.^[9] She died at the age of 98 on June 9, 2023.^[10] At the time of her death they were believed to be the oldest couple living in Massachusetts.^[11]

Chernoff turned 100 on July 1, 2023.^[12]

• Chernoff bound (also known as Chernoff's inequality)
• Chernoff face
• Chernoff's distribution

• Chernoff's faculty profile at Harvard.
• Chernoff's faculty profile Archived 2022-10-07 at the Wayback Machine at MIT.
• Chernoff's biography on the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
• Chernoff's author profile on MathSciNet.
• Chernoff's profile on Mathematics Genealogy.
• Herman Chernoff publications indexed by Google Scholar