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On 23 February 2004 the Israeli Minister of Education announced that Professor Ester Samuel-Cahn of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem will be awarded the Israel Prize for her creative work in the study of statistics. (The prize was awarded on Israel's Independence Day, which was celebrated this year on 27 April.) The Israel Prize is the State's highest and most prestigious award, and since its inception in 1953 has been awarded to some 551 people for their significant contributions to science, culture and the arts.
Professor Samuel-Cahn is particularly known for her research in the areas of Empirical Bayes statistics and Sequential Analysis, especially her work on "prophet inequalities". She also was a central figure in designing the Statistics program at the Hebrew University, and has played a major role in educating generations of statisticians, as well as students from application fields. She headed the Department of Statistics in the latter 1970's and in the 1990's was President of the Israel Statistical Association.
Professor Samuel-Cahn was born in Oslo in 1933, and was forced to flee with her mother and brother to Sweden during the holocaust. She immigrated to Israel in 1946, and worked as a teacher in immigrant camps until 1953 when she started her studies in mathematics and statistics at the Hebrew University. She completed her doctorate at Columbia University in 1961. Since that time she has been a member of faculty at the Hebrew University, where she currently serves as Emeritus Professor.
— Paul Feigin