Aubrey Dale Magoun

Aubrey Dale Magoun, 75, passed away at his home in Tallulah, Louisiana, on December 10, 2019, following a long, serious illness.

Dale was born May 15, 1944, in Ferriday, Louisiana, and graduated from Ferriday High School before earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Louisiana-Monroe (then NLU). He was awarded a PhD in mathematical statistics from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and completed postdoctoral hours in computer science at Mississippi State University.

Dale began his career at Ethicon in Somerville, New Jersey, as a biostatistician. When the opportunity arose to move south, he went to work for the Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and returned to his Louisiana roots, settling in Tallulah.

In Vicksburg, he taught evening graduate classes for LSU and realized teaching on the college level was his true calling. He joined the ULM faculty and, over the next three decades, took great professional pride in his teaching, being an integral part of many leadership committees and serving as department head of computer science, mathematics, and physics. He collaborated with colleagues at ULM and other universities to present research papers at professional conferences throughout the US and in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Vienna, Austria. He formed his own consulting company and worked for private and government agencies on environmental, defense, and quality control projects. He never ceased growing his professional skills. When illness limited his stamina in the classroom, he turned to full-time online teaching, which he enjoyed to the end.

Dale is survived by his devoted wife of 52 years, Louise Testa Magoun; his loving children, son Jay and wife Sara of Bethpage, Tennessee; daughter Katie Magoun Williams and husband George of New Orleans; and grandchildren Joseph and Andrew Magoun and Trey Williams.

For more information view his full obituary.

Willem van Zwet

Willem van Zwet, emeritus professor at the Mathematical Institute Leiden, passed away July 2, 2020. He was 86.

Willem was both a renowned scientist and a powerful organizer. His work on asymptotic expansions and higher-order efficiency of nonparametric statistics is well known, but he also worked on a wide range of other topics, including resampling methods, plant cell statistics, and spatial stochastic processes. His thesis work (published as a monograph in 1964) on convex transformations of random variables is still cited. He was a superb lecturer and delivered the Hotelling, Wald, and Bahadur lectures, among many others.

Willem served as president of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics (IMS), Bernoulli Society, and International Statistical Institute. He was editor-in-chief of the Annals of Statistics and Bernoulli, as well as a board and corporation member of the National Institute for Statistical Sciences in North Carolina and member of the ASA Board of Directors. He also held many other offices and memberships of program, prize, review, advisory, restructuring, organizing, or publication committees.

Willem received numerous awards for his work, including an honorary doctorate from Charles University in Prague and memberships in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea. Willem himself would have been proud to mention his knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands’ Lion, a token of appreciation by his home country (1996). He was instrumental in seeing similar honors bestowed on his international colleagues, including Peter Bickel, Jon Wellner, and Marie Hušková.

Willem’s career coincides with a period of major changes in statistics, but also in the world of science in general. A 2006 interview by Rudy Beran and Nick Fisher gives an interesting, and sometimes hilarious, picture of that period and Willem’s vision of it, which is still relevant today. It was published in Statistical Science in 2009: “An Evening Spent with Bill van Zwet.”

One of Willem’s hobbies emerges in his answer to Rudy and Nick’s question, “If you were stuck on a desert island with a limited choice of reading materials, which of your papers—among those available—would you take with you?” He replied, “That is a strange question. Why would I take any of my papers? A crate of Dutch jenever [gin], or bourbon if you like, would make a lot more sense.”

To read Willem’s full obituary, visit the IMS website.