Paul Meier (statistician)

Paul Meier (July 24, 1924 – August 7, 2011) was a statistician who promoted the use of randomized trials in medicine.

Meier is known for introducing, with Edward L. Kaplan, the Kaplan–Meier estimator, a method for measuring how many patients survive a medical treatment from one duration to another, taking into account that the sampled population changes over time.

Meier's 1957 evaluation of polio vaccine practices published in Science has been described as influential, and the Kaplan–Meier method is thought to have indirectly extended tens of thousands of lives.