George Marsaglia was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He established the lattice structure of congruential random number generators in the paper "Random numbers fall mainly in the planes". This phenomenon is sometimes called the Marsaglia effect. He also developed the so-called "diehard tests

Diehard tests

The diehard tests are a battery of statistical tests for measuring the quality of a random number generator. They were developed by George Marsaglia over several years and first published in 1995 on a CD-ROM of random numbers.These are the tests:...

", a series of tests to determine whether or not a sequence of numbers have the statistical properties that could be expected from a random sequence. In 1995 he published a CD-ROM of random numbers which included the diehard tests.

He is also known for developing some of the most commonly used methods for generating random numbers and using them to produce random samples from various distributions. Some of the most widely used being the multiply-with-carry

Multiply-with-carry

In computer science, multiply-with-carry is a method invented by George Marsaglia for generating sequences of random integers based on an initial set of from two to many thousands of randomly chosen seed values...

, subtract-with-borrow, Xorshift

Xorshift

Xorshift random number generators form a class of pseudorandom number generators that was discovered by George Marsaglia. They generate the next number in their sequence by repeatedly taking the exclusive or of a number with a bit shifted version of itself. This makes them extremely fast on modern...

, KISS and Mother methods for random numbers, and the ziggurat algorithm

Ziggurat algorithm

The ziggurat algorithm is an algorithm for pseudo-random number sampling. Belonging to the class of rejection sampling algorithms, it relies on an underlying source of uniformly-distributed random numbers, typically from a pseudo-random number generator, as well as precomputed tables. The...

 for generating normally or other unimodally distributed random variables.

He was Professor Emeritus of Pure and Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Washington State University

Washington State University

Washington State University is a public research university based in Pullman, Washington, in the Palouse region of the Pacific Northwest. Founded in 1890, WSU is the state's original and largest land-grant university...

 and Professor Emeritus of Statistics at Florida State University

Florida State University

The Florida State University is a space-grant and sea-grant public university located in Tallahassee, Florida, United States. It is a comprehensive doctoral research university with medical programs and significant research activity as determined by the Carnegie Foundation...

.

Marsaglia died of a heart attack on February 15, 2011, in Tallahassee.

Family

Marsaglia had one son, John, with his first wife, Lee Ann Marsaglia. Until his death he was married to Doris Marsaglia. He had two grandchildren, Chris and Nicole Marsaglia, through their son John and his wife Michelle.