A Conversation with George G. Roussas

George G. Roussas was born in the city of Marmara in central Greece, on June 29, 1933. He received a B.A. with high honors in Mathematics from the University of Athens in 1956, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. In 1964--1966, he served as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the California State University, San Jose, and he was a faculty member of the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1966--1976, starting as an Assistant Professor in 1966, becoming a Professor in 1972. He was a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Director of the Laboratory of Applied Mathematics at the University of Patras, Greece, in 1972--1984. He was elected Dean of the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Patras in 1978, and Chancellor of the university in 1981. He served for about three years as Vice President-Academic Affairs of the then new University of Crete, Greece, in 1981--1985. In 1984, he was a Visiting Professor in the Intercollege Division of Statistics at the University of California, Davis, and he was appointed Professor, Associate Dean and Chair of the Graduate Group in Statistics in the same university in 1985; he served in the two administrative capacities in 1985--1999. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute since 1974, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society since 1975, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics since 1983, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association since 1986. He served as a member of the Council of the Hellenic Mathematical Society, and as President of the Balkan Union of Mathematicians.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS299A the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Pao-Lu Hsu (Xu, Bao-lu): The Grandparent of Probability and Statistics in China

The years 1910-1911 are auspicious years in Chinese mathematics with the births of Pao-Lu Hsu, Luo-Keng Hua and Shiing-Shen Chern. These three began the development of modern mathematics in China: Hsu in probability and statistics, Hua in number theory, and Chern in differential geometry. We here review some facts about the life of P.-L. Hsu which have been uncovered recently, and then discuss some of his contributions. We have drawn heavily on three papers in the 1979 Annals of Statistics (volume 7, pages 467-483) by T. W. Anderson, K. L. Chung and E. L. Lehmann, as well as an article by Jiang Ze-Han and Duan Xue-Fu in Hsu's collected papers.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-STS387 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

An Advanced Mathematics Program for Middle School Teachers

The Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and other organizations recommend twenty-one credits of mathematics coursework for prospective middle school teachers, beginning with a foundation based on mathematics for the elementary school curriculum, and followed by advanced courses directly addressing middle school mathematics. Three simultaneous factors—the emergence of the Interdisciplinary Liberal Studies Program at James Madison University, the release of CBMS guidelines, and a statewide focus on a critical shortage of qualified middle school teachers—provided an immediate audience for new upper-division courses built around the guidelines in probability/statistics, algebra, geometry, and calculus/analysis. We will discuss our experience with course planning and adaptation of other programs

A Conversation with Leo Goodman

Leo A. Goodman was born on August 7, 1928 in New York City. He received his A.B. degree, summa cum laude, in 1948 from Syracuse University, majoring in mathematics and sociology. He went on to pursue graduate studies in mathematics, with an emphasis on mathematical statistics, in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University, and in 1950 he was awarded the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. His statistics professors at Princeton were the late Sam Wilks and John Tukey. Goodman then began his academic career as a statistician, and also as a statistician bridging sociology and statistics, with an appointment in 1950 as assistant professor in the Statistics Department and the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, where he remained, except for various leaves, until 1987. He was promoted to associate professor in 1953, and to professor in 1955. Goodman was at Cambridge University in 1953--1954 and 1959--1960 as visiting professor at Clare College and in the Statistical Laboratory. And he spent 1960--1961 as a visiting professor of mathematical statistics and sociology at Columbia University. He was also a research associate in the University of Chicago Population Research Center from 1967 to 1987. In 1970 he was appointed the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, a title that he held until 1987. He spent 1984--1985 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. In 1987 he was appointed the Class of 1938 Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Sociology Department and the Statistics Department. Goodman's numerous honors include honorary D.Sc. degrees from the University of Michigan and Syracuse University, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS276 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

An Evening Spent with Bill van Zwet

Willem Rutger van Zwet was born in Leiden, the Netherlands, on March 31, 1934. He received his high school education at the Gymnasium Haganum in The Hague and obtained his Masters degree in Mathematics at the University of Leiden in 1959. After serving in the army for almost two years, he obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam in 1964, with Jan Hemelrijk as advisor. In 1965, he was appointed Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Leiden and promoted to Full Professor in 1968. He remained in Leiden until his retirement in 1999, while also serving as Associate Professor at the University of Oregon (1965), William Newman Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1990--1996), frequent visitor and Miller Professor (1997) at the University of California at Berkeley, director of the Thomas Stieltjes Institute of Mathematics in the Netherlands (1992--1999), and founding director of the European research institute EURANDOM (1997--2000). At Leiden, he was Dean of the School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (1982--1984). He served as chair of the scientific council and member of the board of the Mathematics Centre at Amsterdam (1983--1996) and the Leiden University Fund (1993--2005).Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS261 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Virginia Commonwealth University\u27s Program for K-6 and 6-8 Teachers: The Interdisciplinary B.S. in Science

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) has very recently revised its requirements for the K-6 Certification to include a total of 21 hours in mathematics and science as well as a three credit hour methods course in mathematics and science. This requirement includes a physical science and a biological science course, each with a laboratory component, a contemporary mathematics course with extensive student projects, collaborative work and applications, a statistics course and interdisciplinary science and mathematics course. We believe that as students complete these requirements they will meet the new State K-6 licensure requirements in all areas, with the exception of geometry. We are developing a new geometry course that we hope will be required of all future teachers. The challenge of preparing middle school teachers to teach mathematics and/or science is much more difficult. VCU has been preparing very few middle school teachers of mathematics and science. We typically averaged less than one middle school science teacher and less than one middle school mathematics teacher per year. This paper provides a description of our interdisciplinary degree in mathematics and science that appears to be attracting significant numbers of students with an interest in teaching mathematics and/or science at the middle school level