From the Desk Of: Matthew Kressel
We congratulate the following new International Statistical Institute (ISI) Elected Members, who were elected recently in ISI Membership Elections. Among those elected in the first round of 2017 were: Sévérien Nkurunziza, University of Windsor, Canada, and Xiaojing Wang, University of Connecticut, USA. The final round of 2016 included: Veerabhadran Baladandayuthapani,…
In last issue’s XL-Files, Xiao-Li Meng set a picture quiz. Nobody has yet correctly identified everyone in the pictures below. If you can, and you’re over 21, you’ll be invited to a “libation and inspiration” at JSM 2017 to celebrate the lives of the nine great statisticians who passed…
Steve Fienberg: “Statistics is what I do!”
Photo: Carnegie Mellon University
Stephen (Steve) E. Fienberg was the “superman of statistics” (L. Wasserman), “a hero of the statistics profession” (M. Straf), “the ultimate public statistician” (A. Carriquiry, E. Lander), and “the best kind of Bayesian” (E. George). His life and…
Ulf Grenander, pictured at home belatedly receiving an award from
Comp. Vis. and Pattern Recognition. Photo kindly supplied by David Mumford
Ulf Grenander was born in 1923 in Vastervik, Sweden, a small coastal town on the Baltic Sea. His degrees were from Uppsala University (B.A., 1946; Licentiate of Philosophy,…
Yoram Gat, one of our new Contributing Editors, describes himself in his blog (also called Pro Bono Statistics) like this: “I am a statistician and software engineer, living in Israel. My interests include politics (theory and practice) and statistics (theory and practice).”
Yoram said the inspiration for the title…