We are sad to report that David Hinkley, IMS Fellow and emeritus professor at UC Santa Barbara, passed away January 11.

David, who was born in England, received his PhD at Imperial College London in 1969; he was a professor of statistics at the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Oxford, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, retiring in 2014. In 1984 he was awarded the COPSS Presidents’ Award; his other honors include fellowships of the ASA and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and elected membership of the International Statistical Institute.

David Hinkley co-authored the 1974 book Theoretical Statistics with David Cox, which was influential in advancing the field of statistics through the 1970s and 80s. He also co-authored Bootstrap Methods and their Application with Anthony Davison. In 1978 he co-authored with Brad Efron an influential paper for the development of statistical theory: “Assessing the accuracy of the maximum likelihood estimator: Observed versus expected Fisher information,” which preceded a rapid development of asymptotic theory of statistical inference, its relationship to conditioning, and the development of improved approximations to likelihood inference. Some of this early work was summarized in “Likelihood,” a paper in the Canadian Journal of Statistics in 1980; this paper had a large impact on research in likelihood theory and methods.

A full obituary will appear in a future issue.