News
November 17, 2015
Practically all of the biographical information contained herein comes from Ester Samuel-Cahn’s “A Conversation with Esther Seiden.” Statistical Science, 1992, 7, pp. 339–357.
On March 3, 1908, Esther Seiden was born in a small town in West Galicia, Poland—at that time ruled by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In her long…
Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, Professor of Statistics, University of Toronto, writes:
It happens to the instructor of every university-level introductory statistics class. You define the mean m, and the variance v. You explain how to estimate the mean from an i.i.d. sample, via $\bar{x} = \frac{1}{n} \sum{x_i}$. Then you have to…
November 16, 2015
Contributing Editor Vlada Limic writes the last column in her series about workshops and workshops, and reports on the results of her “learnering” survey, which she announced in the April 2015 issue:
I wonder how would you react to the following announcement: “The survey on learnering ran…
Bulletin Editor Anirban DasGupta sets this problem. Student members of the IMS are invited to submit solutions (to bulletin@imstat.org with subject “Student Puzzle Corner”). The deadline is January 15, 2016.
It is the turn of a statistics problem this time. Abraham Wald literally opened up a major new framework for…
Bulletin Editor Anirban DasGupta writes the solution to the previous puzzle.
The exact problem was this:
Fix $\epsilon 0$. Give examples of two absolutely continuous distributions with densities $f$ and $g$ such that $|f(x)-g(x)| \leq \epsilon $ for all $x$, and one of the two distributions is infinitely divisible…