Richard D. Gill
British mathematician
Richard David Gill (born 11 September 1951) is a British-Dutch mathematician and professor emeritus at Leiden University. 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 was born in 1951 in Redhill, Surrey, England. He went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1970 and earned a BA degree (1st class) in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1973, followed by a Diploma of Statistics (with distinction) in 1974.
He subsequently moved to the Netherlands, where he married his Dutch wife, and in 1974 began his doctoral research at the Amsterdam Mathematics Centre, later receiving his PhD in mathematics from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) in 1979. His thesis, supervised by Jacobus (Kobus) Oosterhoff and Carel Scheffer, was titled Censoring and Stochastic Integrals.
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".
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2175014. VIAF identifies the subject as 55475388. The Library of Congress control number is n87892270. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1970, 1973 and 1974.
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