TY - JOUR
AU - Cormack, Rachard M.
AB -  George Jolly’s name will remain permanently known to wildlife biologists who try to estimate population numbers and survival rates from recaptures of marked animals. The Jolly-Seber method, published 35 years ago, is standard, definitive, and solved a problenl that had been unsuccessfully or incompletely attacked over the previous 35 years by such as Fisher, Moran, and Hammersley. Success came from extended, messy, elementary algebra-the kind that a mathematical colf league o mine recommended should only be practised by consenting adults in private. No computer algebra then. The algebra led to elegant estimates for population size. It was the second time George had cracked such a problem, having previously, with even messier algebra, analyzed the deterministic model, with the unrealistic assumptions of which he had become dissatisfied. In a note he sent t o the IS1 in 1980 when the 1965 paper became a citation classic, George described his work thus: “Happily, after many pages of algebra, I arrived at a solution to the maximum likelihood equations.. . . By a stroke of luck I noticed that by setting all the weights to unity, the old and new estimates were arithmetically equivalent”understatements typical of George’s modesty. He “learned from 
TI - George Jolly
JO - Biometrics
DO - 10.1111/j.0006-341x.2000.01278.x
DA - 2000-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/george-jolly-eb0KLc71TY
SP - 1278
VL - 56
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -