Aerospace engineering faculty member Melkior Ornik is also a mathematician, a history buff, and a strong believer in integrity when it comes to using hard science in public discussions. So, when a story popped up in his news feed about a pair of researchers who developed a statistical method to analyze datasets and used it to purportedly refute the number of Holocaust victims from a concentration camp in Croatia, it naturally caught his attention.
Ornik is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He proceeded to study the research in depth and used the method to re-analyze the same data from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Then he wrote a rebuttal paper debunking the researchers’ findings. — Source