From the Desk Of: Matthew Kressel
Donald Lyman Burkholder died in his sleep on April 14, 2013, in Urbana, Illinois. He was born January 19, 1927, in Octavia, Nebraska, the fourth of five children of Elmer and Susan (Rothrock) Burkholder. His mother had been a schoolteacher, and his father was a farmer who served on the…

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Martin B. Wilk, OC, died in Yorba Linda, California, on February 19, 2013; he was 90. Throughout his career, Martin demonstrated that a statistician can successfully span academia, industry and government. For over half a century, he made important contributions, and occupied senior positions, in each of these domains. While…

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Ya’acov Ritov is professor in the Department of Statistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his PhD from the Hebrew University in 1983, and is a fellow of the IMS. Ya’acov’s (statistical) research interests include complex and large dimensional model, empirical Bayes procedures, semi- and non-parametric models. His…

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Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA. He is a graduate of the Technion, Israel, and joined the faculty of UCLA in 1970, where he currently directs the Cognitive Systems Laboratory and conducts research in artificial intelligence, causal inference and philosophy of science. Pearl has…

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Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta writes: It is the mark of an instructed mind, said Aristotle, not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible. Delicate and classy, still, the nature of mathematics is such that quantities of intrinsic importance often cannot be evaluated in a simple…

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