David L. Donoho Receives Honorary Degree

On October 9, David L. Donoho received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from The University of Chicago. The occasion was a special convocation, the 500th in the university’s history, and Donoho’s was one of four degrees awarded. In presenting the degree, the university’s president—mathematician Robert Zimmer—said, “David L. Donoho is a mathematical statistician and also one of the more influential applied mathematicians of his generation. Building upon the discipline of statistics, Donoho has developed effective new approaches to constructing low-dimensional representations for modern high-dimensional data problems. His work provides new insight into some of the most pressing scientific questions of the present day.”

Donoho is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the Humanities and Sciences and professor in the department of statistics at Stanford University.

The University of Chicago awards honorary degrees only for distinguished scholarship. Previously, honorary degrees have gone to R. A. Fisher, Harold Hotelling, Jerzy Neyman, Maurice S. Bartlett, John W. Tukey, Fred Mosteller, Erich L. Lehmann, Charles M. Stein, Ulf Grenander, Bradley Efron, David Aldous, Persi Diaconis, and Grace Wahba.