Ehsanes Saleh with his wife, Shahidara

A.K. Md. Ehsanes Saleh, Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor of Statistics at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, passed away on September 3, 2023. Professor Saleh died at the age of 91 with his family beside him. Born in the Munshigonj district in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1932, Ehsanes Saleh received his BSc (1951) and MSc (1953) degrees in Statistics from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and PhD (1965) degree in Statistics from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He worked at Carleton University since 1966.

Professor A.K. Md. Ehsanes Saleh is a prominent name in the international statistics space for his groundbreaking research, pioneering academic role, outstanding professional contributions, thought-provoking supervision and mentoring in his discipline. Colleagues and peers of Professor Saleh across the globe have acknowledged and recognized his great contributions in many ways. This includes the Honorary Membership of SSC, Canada; Fellow of IMS, ASA, RSS, and the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences; Elected Member of ISI, Netherlands; and Life Member of the Bangladesh Statistical Association and Islamic Countries Society of Statistical Sciences (ISOSS). He was awarded the highly prestigious QM Hossain Gold Medal by Bangladesh Statistical Association in 1992; the ISESCO–ISOSS Gold Medal in 1999 in recognition of his best research in statistical sciences among the OIC member countries; the ISOSS Gold Medal in 2005 for his book on Mathematical Statistics; the Dhaka University (ISRT) Gold Medal in 2006 for his outstanding editorial services to the Journal of Statistical Research; and the SSC Gold Medal in 2007 for his exceptional research and services.

Professor Saleh made seminal contributions in many areas of statistics, specifically in order statistics, L-estimation, preliminary test and shrinkage estimation, non-parametric estimation and auto-regression quantiles. He pioneered the work on optimum spacing for the ABLUE and test of hypothesis for the location /scale and quantile functions of location-scale families of distributions, preliminary test approach to Stein-type estimation in non-parametric settings. He also became the foremost scholar merging two diverse areas of robust statistics and shrinkage estimation to the benefit of us all. In addition, his path-breaking work on auto-regression quantiles has opened the door for many fundamental researches in time-series. He is considered a world leader in nonparametric statistics for his outstanding contributions establishing the area of “Preliminary Test Approach to Shrinkage Estimation” in a nonparametric setting. His major research contributions are documented in his recent books, Theory of Preliminary Test and Stein-type Estimation with Applications (2006), Statistical Inference for Models with Multivariate t-Distributed Errors (2014), and Theory of Ridge Regression Estimation with Applications (2019), all published by Wiley & Sons. He was intellectually active until his death, and was seriously pursuing his research producing his last book on Rank-Based Methods for Shrinkage and Selection: With Application to Machine Learning (2022).

Professor Saleh trained many young statisticians and presented many keynotes and invited addresses in various conferences in many countries around the globe. He will remain as a man with high distinction and long vision in the arena of Statistics. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University, MIT, UC Berkeley, Michigan State University, Banach Centre in Poland, and University of Toronto. He was also an adjunct Professor in the department of Biometry at Kansas University Medical Centre since 1984. He was the third Eugene Lukacs Distinguished (visiting) Professor (1992–93) in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA.

He is survived by his wife, two sons, one daughter and several grandchildren.

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Compiled by Emeritus Professor Dr Shahjahan Khan, University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and Vice Chancellor, Asian University of Bangladesh, Dhaka; Dr Mina Norouzirad, Center for Mathematics and Applications, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal; Professor Mohammad Arashi, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran; and Professor B.M. Golam Kibria, Florida International University, USA.

[Note that Dr Mina Norouzirad’s affiliation was incorrectly listed in the printed version of this obituary as University of Lisbon, Portugal. We apologise for any misunderstanding.]