Jack Hall

Jack Hall

David Oakes, Jon Wellner, Robert Strawderman, and Siddhartha Dalal

W. Jackson “Jack” Hall—a Fellow of the ASA, emeritus professor of statistics, and professor in the department of biostatistics and computational biology at the University of Rochester—died peacefully on October 14, 2012, at the age of 82.

In the course of his long and highly distinguished career, Jack made deep and influential contributions to many areas of statistics, including decision theory, Bayesian statistics, survival analysis, semiparametric inference, and sequential analysis. In recent years, he used his expertise in sequential analysis to work extensively with medical colleagues to develop innovative statistical designs for clinical trials in cardiology.

Jack was educated at The Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a PhD in statistics in 1955. In 1953–1954, he attended the universities of Manchester and Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar.

After a spell at what is now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (helping to track down the faulty batches of the Salk polio vaccine), he took a faculty position at UNC Chapel Hill, where he became full professor in 1955. He moved to the University of Rochester in 1969 to chair the new department of statistics. He was instrumental in developing the doctoral program at Rochester. He was also a key figure in the establishment of the division of biostatistics, the forerunner of the current department of biostatistics and computational biology. Jack held visiting positions at Stanford, Berkeley, Sheffield, Seattle, Reading, Oxford, and Sydney.

In addition to the ASA, Jack was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

Jack was known for his devotion to teaching, including advising graduate students. At Chapel Hill, he played a pivotal organizational role in maintaining the graduate program at a time of transition. At Rochester, he established a doctoral program and advised 12 students, many of whom have gone on to distinguished careers.

Jack was the first recipient of the University of Rochester Lifetime Award for Graduate Education in 2004. All his advisees, and many others, wrote letters in support. Common themes included the care and attention he gave to his students, his detailed reading of their dissertations, and help with personal matters from the time they came to Rochester until they graduated and later. Many commented that they had become lifetime personal friends.

Jack remained active professionally until ill heath forced him to retire in July 2012. On the occasion of a small gathering to mark his retirement, he took great delight in being informed that, according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project website, he was (via his own adviser Wassily Hoeffding) a seventh-generation descendant of Gauss. He promptly emailed all his students informing them that they were eight-generation descendants.

Jack published more than 150 papers. A number of early papers—some co-authored with Alexander Langmuir, a giant of public health—described the spread of the 1955 polio outbreak and the methods taken to monitor it. His research interests spanned a huge range of modern statistical activity, including sequential analysis, sufficiency, and invariance; contiguity theory; efficiency issues in semiparametric estimation and testing; Bayes procedures; large deviations and p-values; and survival analysis.

In a landmark collaboration encouraged by the editors of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics, E. L. Lehmann and J. L. Hodges, Jack’s 1965 paper with Robert Wijsman and Jayanta K. Ghosh provided the statistical community with an important view of the subtle connections and interactions between sufficiency and invariance and applications thereof to sequential analysis.

Jack’s interest in sequential analysis lasted throughout his career, beginning with his work on sequential versions of Stein’s two-stage test in the early 1960s and continuing until work in 2001–2003 with B. Yakir and Aiyi Liu. Much of this research interacted substantially with his applied work on clinical trials for various problems associated with cardiology, conducted with Arthur Moss and others at the University of Rochester (UR) Medical Center. Recently, Jack’s professional time was spent mostly on his collaborations with colleagues in cardiology, but he continued to teach his trademark courses in large sample theory and sequential analysis.

Jack, who lived four miles from the UR campus, was known to ride a bicycle to work for many years. He was an avid skier and outdoorsman. In addition to his wife, Nancy, he is survived by children, Rebecca, Bryan, and Kay Cohen; stepchildren, Barbara Hufsmith and Edwin Hufsmith; and seven grandchildren. His daughter, Jacqueline Minet, predeceased him.

The department of biostatistics and computational biology at the University of Rochester has set up a fund, the William Jackson Hall Graduate Student Fellowship, as an enduring tribute to Jack’s legacy and influence on the statistics doctoral degree program and its students. If you would like information about making a donation in Jack’s memory, contact the department chairman, Robert Strawderman, at robert_strawderman@urmc.rochester.edu

William Lawton

William Lawton passed away in his home in Rochester, New York, on July 9, 2012.

Lawton began his statistics career in the management systems development division at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, and worked with leaders in quantitative analytics such as Richard A. Freund and J.E. “Ted” Jackson. When he realized the need for more advanced analytics techniques, he attended the University of California at Berkley and earned his PhD in statistics under Erich Lehmann. A paper based on his dissertation was published in the Annals of Mathematical Statistics as “Concentration of Random Quotients.”

Returning to Kodak, Lawton assumed a leadership position first as group leader of the mathematical analysis group and later as supervisor of the applied mathematics section; his team included Mary Maggio, Dick Scott, and Ed Sylvestre.

Later, Lawton was appointed editor of Technometrics, and in 1985, after a year as director of strategic information, he became corporate director of business research for the Eastman Kodak Company, serving on the company’s corporate quality advisory council until he retired from this position in 1990.

After retiring from Kodak, he was named professor of marketing at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester. He also became a senior research associate with Joiner Associates of Madison, Wisconsin.

Riaz Rana

Riaz H. Rana, a statistician who founded Statistica in 1978, died November 4 at Howard County General Hospital in Maryland.

A commercial airline pilot in Pakistan, Rana immigrated to the United States in 1960 and earned a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Connecticut. In 1968, he moved to Columbia, Maryland, and began working at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel.