Ronald Getoor

Ronald Kay Getoor (9 February 1929, Royal Oak, Michigan) is an American mathematician.

Getoor received from the University of Michigan bachelor's degree in 1950, master's degree in 1951, and Ph.D. in 1954 under Arthur Herbert Copeland with thesis Connections between operators in Hilbert space and random functions of second order. As a postdoc he was an instructor at Princeton University. He became in 1956 an assistant professor and then full professor at the University of Washington. During the academic year 1964–1965 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University. From 1966 until his retirement in 2000 he was a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Getoor's research deals with probability theory, especially the theory of Markov processes and potential theory. In 1970 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and in 2012 a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He married in 1959. His wife Ann Getoor worked on the design of commercial aircraft at Boeing, and his daughter Lise Getoor is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.