Abraham Wald was born on October 31, 1902 in a region of Hungary that is now part of Romania. The Wald family was Jewish and Abraham was schooled at home. He received a PhD in mathematics at the University of Vienna in 1931. Wald worked as a tutor for a banker and economist until 1937 while doing research in geometry with his doctoral advisor, Karl Menger.
Wald moved to the United States in 1938 following the Nazi occupation of Austria. He studied statistics at Columbia University and was appointed to the faculty in 1941. Wald is best known as the father of statistical decision theory, one of the great unifying principles of statistics. He also made fundamental contributions to hypothesis testing and sequential analysis. Wald died on December 13, 1950 while on a visit to India.