Lucien Le Cam

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lucien Marie Le Cam (born November 18, 1924 in Croze , Creuse department , † April 25, 2000 ) was a French mathematician and statistician . He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley .

Lucien Le Cam

Life

Le Cam came from a farming family in Felletin , where his brother was mayor for a long time. He attended high school in Clermont-Ferrand and from 1944 studied mathematics at the Sorbonne with a license in 1945. He then worked as a statistician for Electricité de France , among other things for flood forecasting at dams. This led to his first publication and later a lecture at the second Berkeley Symposium in 1961 (a model named after him is known in hydrology). During his time in the industry he attended a weekly statistics seminar under Georges Darmois (1888–1960). There he met Jerzy Neyman , who invited him to Berkeley in 1950. In 1952 he received his doctorate there (on asymptotic properties of Bayesian estimates) and became an instructor there. Soon after, he had his first doctoral student (Julius Blum). In 1953 he became an assistant professor of mathematics and was from 1955 at the newly founded faculty for statistics, from 1960 with a full professorship. From 1962 to 1965 he headed the faculty and edited the Berkeley Symposia with Neyman. He stayed in Berkeley for a time in 1972/73 as director of the Center de Recherches Mathématiques in Montreal. In 1991 he retired, but was still scientifically active.

He is known as the founder of modern asymptotic statistics. In 1960 he introduced the Local Asymptotic Normality Condition (LAN) and the contiguity concept (contiguity).

The book by Albers and Alexanderson describes how his daughter's cancer led him to occupy himself with the medical applications of statistics.

In 1957, Le Cam became Sloan Research Fellow . In 1976 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was invited speaker at the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto ( Some recent results in the asymptotic theory of statistical estimation ).

Fonts

  • Asymptotic methods in statistical decision theory, Springer Verlag 1986
  • with Grace Lo Yang: Asymptotics in statistics: some basic concepts, Springer Verlag 2000
  • Locally asymptotically normal families of distributions, University of California Publications in Statistics 3, 1960, pp. 37-98.

literature

  • Donald J. Albers, GL Alexanderson, Constance Reid More Mathematical People - Contemporary Conversations , Academic Press 1994

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Le Cam, Lucien
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Cam, Lucien Marie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Croze
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 2000