Charles Roy Henderson ( – ) was an American
statistician and a pioneer in
animal breeding — the application of quantitative methods for the genetic evaluation of domestic livestock. He developed
mixed model equations to obtain
best linear unbiased predictions of breeding values and, in general, any random effect. He invented three methods for the estimation of
variance components in unbalanced settings of mixed models, and invented a method for constructing the inverse of
Wright's numerator
relationship matrix based on a simple list of pedigree information. He, with his Ph.D. student
Shayle R. Searle, greatly extended the use of matrix notation in statistics. His methods are widely used by the domestic livestock industry throughout the world and are a cornerstone of linear model theory.