Bernard Harris

Bernard Harris passed away peacefully on January 28, 2011, at Tulane University Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, following complications from heart surgery.

Harris was born on June 20, 1926, in New York City. An academically precocious youngster, he graduated at an early age from Townsend-Harris High School and entered City College of New York. During the midst of his college education, he was drafted into the Army, assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, and sent to Germany near the end of World War II. Upon completion of military service, he finished his bachelor’s degree in business administration at City College in 1946. He changed his academic focus to mathematics and statistics, earned a master’s degree from The George Washington University in 1953, and, in one year, completed his doctorate at Stanford University in 1958.

During the years between his master’s and doctorate degrees, Harris worked as a statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau and as a mathematician for the National Security Agency. He became an associate professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln after completing his doctorate and moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to work as a professor in the Mathematics Research Center from 1964 to 1985 and as a professor in the statistics department from 1966 to 2002. After Harris retired from UW-Madison, he rejoined the faculty of the statistics department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as an adjunct faculty member until his death.

He enjoyed visiting professorships at the Technical Institute in Munich, Germany; Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands; University of Lund, Sweden; the Mathematics Institute Steklova, Moscow, Russia; University of Muenster, Germany; Heinrich Heine University in Duesseldorf, Germany; and the Kungliska Techniska Hogskolan. He also was a member of many commissions and advisory boards for the government, including a review board of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Statistics Task Force for the FAA/DOD Committee on Material Properties.

Harris was an elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association. He was proud to be a founding member of the ASA Section on Risk Analysis and served as its first chair. He was a member of the Classification Society of North America, serving on its board of directors. He was also a member of the International Classification Society and the American Mathematical Association.

Harris received the Pioneers of Science Award. He was a perennial advocate of and contributor to statistical science for the Department of the Army. He participated as part of the Mathematics Research Center at Wisconsin that supported the Army in addressing research questions and presented his work at countless annual statistical conferences.

Harris’s contributions to risk analysis, reliability, probability, and statistical inferences with application to open Department of Defense questions was recognized in 1982 with the Wilks Award for Contributions to Statistical Methodologies in Army Research, Development, and Testing. His work continued to address current problems in his later years, with recent work concerning mathematical methods in combating terrorism and his 2010 paper, titled “Random Contamination of Semiconductor Materials.”

Harris was the author of the book Theory of Probability and the editor of Spectral Analysis of Time Series and Graph Theory and Its Applications. He published hundreds of articles and reviews over the course of his career, but was most proud of his work in random mappings, combinatorics, reliability, and risk analysis.

In addition to his academic interests, Harris enjoyed a variety of music (classical, opera, and jazz), reading, gourmet cooking, films, and doing the New York Times crossword puzzles in ink. He also loved to create puns.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed to the American Statistical Association to support the education of young statisticians.

James Richard Murphy

James Richard Murphy died peacefully during his sleep on December 21, 2010.

He earned a bachelor’s in chemistry from The University of Chicago and a master’s in mathematics from the University of Denver. In 1977, he earned his PhD in biostatistics from The Johns Hopkins University.

Murphy served as director of the biostatistics core of the University of Colorado Cancer Center and was head of the division of biostatistics at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center.

Read more about Murphy’s life.

Patrick W. Crockett

Patrick W. Crockett, 58, passed away on December 29, 2010, in his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Born in Houston, Texas, Crockett attended The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his PhD in 1983. He was director of statistical sciences for 14 years at SRA International in Research Triangle Park.

Crockett was an avid sailor and loved the ocean. He was also a talented painter and boat builder, whose hand-painted wooden kayaks were admired by many. He enjoyed camping and cycling with family and friends and will be remembered for his special sense of humor, spirituality, warmth, and child-like wonder.