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Kai Lai Chung taught probability for nearly 40 years and supervised 14 Ph.D.
students: Warren Hirsch, Rafael Chacon, William Pruitt, Norman Pullman, Naresh
Jain, Arthur Pittenger, Robert Smythe, Michael Chamberlain, Christopher Nevison,
Michael Steele, Ruth Williams, Elton Hsu, Ming Liao and Vassilis Papanicolaou.
The Mathematics Genealogy project currently lists a total of 119 academic
descendants for Kai Lai Chung. His enthusiasm for mathematics was evident in his
energetic classroom and research presentations and in his lively one-to-one
discussions. He had a spirited and candid delivery style. He is particularly
remembered by collaborators and colleagues for his stimulating questions,
delivered in person, or by letter and phone, and in later years by fax.
In 1981, Kai Lai Chung, along with Erhan Cinlar and Ronald Getoor, initiated the
“Seminars on Stochastic Processes.” These conferences, with their innovative
structure of just a few formal talks, allowing plenty of time for informal
discussions and research problem sessions, continue as highly successful annual
meetings to this day. The 1987 Seminar, held at Princeton University, honored
Kai Lai Chung and Gilbert Hunt around the time of their retirements. Among the
other participants were Claude Dellacherie, Paul-Andre Meyer and Jacques Neveu,
who came from France to honor Chung and Hunt, and also to tell of their
respective important influences on the French probability school. The 2010
Seminar, to be hosted by the University of Central Florida, will have a session
to commemorate Kai Lai Chung's contributions to probability.
Kai Lai Chung also played an influential role in the development of probability
theory in his native China immediately after the chaotic years of the Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976). His visit to China in 1978 (together with Joseph Doob
and Jacques Neveu) was the starting point for renewed contact of Chinese
probabilists with the West. He visited China many times after that giving
numerous lectures and short courses, and helped young Chinese students to gain
opportunities to study in the United States. He also served as an external
examiner for several Universities in the Asian region, including the National
University of Singapore.
Kai Lai's rest for life, combined with his energetic curiosity, was apparent to
all who knew him, both within and outside of the community of mathematics.
Besides his pursuit of mathematics, he had broad cultural interests. Educated in
a classical Chinese tradition, he was deeply familiar with literary traditions
and forms of the Chinese language. His family recalls how, in his many travels
to China from 1978 onward, he sought out and helped re-establish the stature of
writers, poets, painters and calligraphers he counted as old friends. His
passion for culture was not restricted to that of his homeland. In his extensive
travels, he always made sure to see important historical, cultural or natural
sites. He surprised many with his wide ranging and intimate knowledge of
literature and music, especially opera. He spoke several languages, and
particularly delighted in practicing Italian, which he taught himself in his
retirement.
We are grateful for having known Kai Lai, for his inspiration and guidance, and
his many engaging conversations over the years. He was unique and highly
memorable; he will be missed.
Farid AitSahlia, Stanford University
Erhan Cinlar, Princeton University
Elton P. Hsu, Northwestern University
Ruth J. Williams, University of California
A memorial service, to be held at Stanford University, is being planned for the fall. The family requests that charitable donations in memory of Kai Lai Chung be made to the Kai Lai Chung memorial fund at Stanford University, Mathematics Department.
Professor Erich Lehmann, a major figure in our field of statistics, died on
September 12, 2009, at the age of 91. Lehmann, who taught in Berkeley’s
Statistics Department, touched the lives of many people in statistics and
beyond. He was a leading figure in the second generation of statisticians,
following the establishment of the modern field by Neyman, Fisher and Wald
before and shortly after the Second World War. As is usual after a period of
explosive innovation, confusion reigned. It was Lehmann’s great talent to clear
the fog and build a coherent theoretical structure. This was reflected in his
great books, Testing Statistical Hypotheses (1959) and Theory of Point
Estimation (1983), which were the centerpieces of graduate statistical
education for most of the last half of the century, and have been translated
into many languages. The structures he built incorporated much of his own
research into decision theoretic questions, the theory of unbiased estimation,
rank based methods including their asymptotic theory and many other areas of
statistics, including concepts of dependence, multiple comparison procedures,
the history of statistics and much else.
Lehmann achieved all the major honors awarded in the field and beyond: the
prestigious Wald and Fisher lectureships, the presidency of the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics and the editorship of its main journal, The Annals of
Mathematical Statistics. He was granted a remarkable three Guggenheim
Fellowships in 1955, 1966 and 1980 and was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 1975 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978. The
Universities of Leiden and Chicago awarded him honorary doctorates. At Berkeley,
he held Miller Professorships twice and served reluctantly but very effectively
as Department Chair.
Born in Strasbourg, France in 1917, Lehmann was raised in Frankfurt am Main,
where his family had deep roots. Fleeing the Nazis with his family in 1933, he
graduated from high school in Switzerland and attended college in Cambridge,
England. He enrolled in Berkeley as a graduate student in 1940 and never left,
save for stints in the Air Force during World War II, when he was stationed in
Guam, and leaves at Columbia, Princeton and Stanford. Obtaining his Ph.D. in
1946, he embarked on a teaching career that included the supervision of more
than 40 doctoral students of his own, several of whom became leaders in the next
generation of statisticians. This achievement was due not only to his great
scientific stature but also to remarkable personal qualities. He was kind and
generous of spirit, had an unusual sensitivity to the feelings of others and a
great astuteness about the world, what could be achieved, and how to do it. As a
consequence, his impact on his students and colleagues went well beyond the
scientific. They honored him with a Festschrift (1983) for his 65th birthday, a
series of three Lehmann Symposia (2002, 2004, 2007), and a forthcoming volume of
selected works.
In addition to his masterpieces, Lehmann published three important, less
advanced texts: Basic Concepts of Statistics (with his longtime
collaborator and friend J. L. Hodges, Jr.) Nonparametrics: Statistics Based
on Ranks, and Elements of Large Sample Theory. After a second edition of his
classic Testing Statistical Hypotheses in 1986, he recruited young
collaborators for further editions of his major texts – George Casella for
Estimation in 1998 and Joe Romano for a third edition of Testing in
2005. These were major revisions that brought the books back to the frontiers of
research. In his last decade, he turned his energies to the history of the field
in whose development he played such an important part, publishing his
professional autobiography, Reminiscences of a Statistician: The Company I
Kept, and an account of the productive rivalry between Fisher and Neyman
tentatively titled Fisher, Neyman, and the Creation of Classical Statistics,
completed shortly before his death, to be published by Springer. He also enjoyed
a lifelong passion for literature and in retirement translated stories by
favorite authors such as Adalbert Stifter and Wilhelm Raabe, seeking to give
them a wider audience than they previously enjoyed. At the time of his death, he
was working with Fritz Scholz, a former student, on a new edition of his
Nonparametrics to be used in conjunction with the popular “R” statistical
language.
He is survived by his wife, Juliet Popper Shaffer, herself an accomplished
member of our field and a collaborator during the later part of his life, and a
loving blended family that includes his three children, Stephen, Barbara and
Sophia; three step-children, Ron, Len and Tanya; eight grandchildren and two
great-grandchildren with a third on the way.
Peter Bickel, Berkeley, and the Family