Hans R. Künsch, former chair of the Memorials Committee, writes:

The IMS has a history of over 80 years, and during this time our members have made many contributions to the “development and dissemination of the theory and applications of statistics and probability.” In order to highlight our rich history and to make the accomplishments and contributions of IMS members visible to the whole scientific community, the IMS Scientific Legacy Project was created through an initiative by former IMS President Jim Pitman. In 2011, during Peter Hall’s term as IMS President, Paul Shaman was appointed Scientific Legacy Editor. Ruth Williams served as IMS President in the following year and has further encouraged and assisted with this project to the present. Paul has collected and checked information from many sources about all IMS Fellows, and we are pleased to announce that a beta version of webpages displaying this material is now available at https://imstat.org/scientific-legacy-database/

Find the Scientific Legacy Database on the IMS website under “Awards & Honors”. This is David Blackwell’s entry.

Paul deserves our greatest thanks for all the work he has put into this project. In addition, Jim played a critical role in the development, helping design the format, writing programs to display content in the early stages, and providing valuable advice.

The list of IMS Fellows currently numbers 1,214, of whom 402 are known to be deceased. For each Fellow, a webpage lists the year elected with, since 1999, the text of the citation for election, honors (limited to key IMS, Bernoulli Society, and COPSS awards, national and international awards, and a few selected other honors), and listings and links for biographical pieces, Wikipedia pages, and Festschriften. For the deceased Fellows, dates of birth and death are given, and additional listings, including memoirs, autobiographies, collected works, oral histories, archive collections, bibliographies, portraits, obituaries, and in memoriam articles, are also provided.

Paul collects information about deaths of Fellows regularly from a number of sources, e.g., IMS Bulletin, Amstat News and the ISI webpage. Nevertheless, we appreciate if you let Paul and the Bulletin Editor, Tati Howell, know if you hear about a recent death of an IMS Fellow, or are aware of a past death that is not noted in the database.

The work on completing information contained in this database is an ongoing process, and much remains to be done. Members are encouraged to submit corrections and make suggestions for additional information to be included to the Scientific Legacy Editor at ims@imstat.org. Please be aware that the goal is to make the available information on individual Fellows comparable. For this reason, additions like current affiliations or links to a personal webpage would require considerable time and effort as this information would have to be collected and checked for many Fellows, and frequently updated.

A current list of selected national and international honors for the Fellows is available at https://imstat.org/2019/07/19/our-fellows-achievements/