Samuel Kotz

Samuel Kotz (born August 30, 1930 in Harbin , China , † March 16, 2010 in Silver Spring , Maryland , USA ) was an American statistician of Russian-Jewish origin. He became known in professional circles for several standard works in statistics and probability theory and was co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences .

Life

His father's family fled from Ufa, Russia, to Harbin, Manchuria , in 1919 . Kotz grew up there and began studying electrical engineering. In 1949 he emigrated to Israel, where he served in the army for two years, mainly as a mathematics instructor. He then took up studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and graduated in 1956. He then worked for the Israeli Meteorological Service . Through a contact with Jacob Wolfowitz he got a scholarship from Cornell University and received his doctorate there in 1960 with a paper on information theory.

His first stop after that was Chapel Hill University in 1962 . He became a research assistant at the University of Toronto in 1964 . In 1967 he became a professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia . His other positions were from 1979 the University of Maryland, College Park as a professor at the local economics faculty and, after his retirement in 1997, the operations research department of George Washington University in Washington, DC He died in 2010.

research

As an author or editor, Samuel Kotz has (co-) published 47 monographs and encyclopedia volumes, including three Russian-English scientific dictionaries, as well as over 280 other publications.

To this day he is known primarily for two extensive standard statistical works:

• 1969 to 1972 he published with Norman Lloyd Johnson a three-volume series Distributions in Statistics on probability distributions . The individual volumes reflect the current state of research on discrete distributions ( Discrete Distributions , 1969), univariate steady distributions ( Continuous Univariate Distributions , 1970) and multivariate steady distributions ( Continuous Multivariate Distributions , 1972). From 1992 to 1997, together with Adrienne W. Kemp and N. Balakrishnan, a new four-volume edition was published, with the discrete distributions also being divided into univariate and multivariate distributions across two volumes.
• The ten-volume Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences was published from 1982 to 1989 , under the editor-in-chief of Johnson and Kotz. In 2005 a new 16-volume edition was published by the editors Kotz, CB Read, N. Balakrishnan and B. Vidakovic.

literature

• Erich L. Lehmann (2007): Reminiscences of a Statistician: The Company I Kept, Springer, New York. 57.Samuel Kotz, pp. 205 ff.
• Saralees Nadarajah (2002): A Conversation with Samuel Kotz, Statistical Science , Vol. 17, No. 2, 220-233. [1] (Detailed interview about Kotz's life and research)

swell

1. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 23, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 23, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.