Obituary
Tapas K. Chandra, professor of statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute, has passed away in Calcutta; he was 64. Professor Chandra is known for his work on asymptotic stochastic expansions of test statistics under Pitman and fixed alternatives and for strong laws for dependent sequences. Jointly with Sreela Gangopadhyay,…
Charles M. Stein, one of the most original statisticians and probabilists of the 20th century died in Fremont, California on November 24th, 2016. Stein’s paradox showing the classical least squares estimates of several parameters can be usefully improved by combining seeming unrelated pieces of information is one of the most…
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,…
Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes:
“How could that happen?” was perhaps the question of the year for 2016. Other than a small percentage of perceptive minds, which I hope include disproportionately more of my fellow statisticians, the rest of the human population seems to still be coping with the aftermath…