James O. Ramsay (born 5 September 1942) is a Canadian statistician and Professor Emeritus at McGill University, Montreal, who developed much of the statistical theory behind multidimensional scaling (MDS). Together with co-author Bernard Silverman, he is widely recognized as the founder of functional data analysis. He wrote four influential books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles in statistical and psychometric journals. In 1998, the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) awarded him a gold medal for research in 1998. In 2012 the SCS awarded him with an honorary membership. He was president of the Psychometric Society in 1981–1982 and president of the SSC in 2002–2003. Over his career, "three of his papers were read to the Royal Statistical Society, and another won The Canadian Journal of Statistics 2000 Best Paper Award." In retirement, as of 2010, he continued to hold adjunct appointments at Department of Chemical Engineering, Queen's University and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa. Family life James Ramsay was born in Prince George, British Columbia on 5 September 1942, but didn't reside there long. In his early years, the family spent time in Smithers, British Columbia, Richdale, Alberta, Flaxcombe, Saskatchewan, and Wainwright, Alberta. His father worked as a telegrapher on the Canadian National Railway. He has five children with his wife, Maureen. His son Tim Ramsay grew up to become a statistician, winning a Pierre Robillard Award while attending Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario; they have since collaborated on publications in their professional relationship. Education Ramsay was an avid reader of Charles Dickens by the age of 12. "Through literature I became interested in basically everything" except for mathematics, which he regarded during his high school years as trivial and non-interesting. He attended the University of Alberta for his undergraduate degree, studying literature, linguistics, and psychology, attaining a bachelor's degree in Education. While attending the University of Alberta, he aced an introductory course in statistics, which lead him to calculus, his first taste of advanced mathematics. "That was a real eye-opener to me; it just blew me away!" The degree program did not offer him many opportunities to take further math instruction, but his preferred learning style was autodidactic, and he often skipped lectures in order to read at home, where he could read as he chose. Upon graduating in 1964, his mentor, psychometrician Stephen M. Hunka encouraged him to apply to graduate programs at Berkeley, Illinois,