About Us

The Department has more than 5 000 undergraduate students and more than 150 postgraduate students, 26 full-time and 7 part-time academic personnel and 8 non-academic staff members. There are also more than 40 students working on a part-time basis in the Department as Assistant Lecturers, Tutors and Student Assistants – all-in-all the Department is driven by about 80 people!

During the many years of its existence, the Department of Statistics strived to make a worthy contribution to the university’s general tasks of teaching, research and community service. It produced many graduates, majoring in either Statistics (for the BCom degree) or Mathematical Statistics (for the BSc degree) and thousands of students who took Statistics or some other tailor-made service courses for degrees in many disciplines at the University. A steady flow in postgraduate students complemented the teaching and research outputs of the Department. 

On the research front, the Department contributes in various fields, including general linear modeling and categorical data analysis, distribution-free methods, time series analysis, statistical process control, distribution theory, statistics education and official statistics. The Department of Statistics is also well-known for its consultation service, both internally to researchers at the University of Pretoria and externally on commercial basis to clients from outside the university. We are indeed very proud of the contributions of our staff through the Bureau for Statistical and Survey Methodology (STATOMET) and also through the campus companies Business Enterprises at UP and Continuing Education at UP, better known as BE at UP and CE at UP.

The Departments’ alumni include some well-known names such as HS Steyn, a founder member and honorary President of SASA and who was, inter alia, Vice-Principal of UNISA and the first chairperson of the Advisory Board for Universities and Technikons, CF Crouse who was Principal of Vista University, the late Geert de Wet, head of the Department of Economics at the University of Pretoria and RJ Stumpf, a former Vice-Chancellor of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. The current CEO of Outsurance Company, Willem Roos, also got his Mathematical Statistics background in this Department.