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Wally Smith (mathematician)

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Name
  
Wally Smith

Role
  
Mathematician


Born
  
November 12, 1926 (age 97) London (
1926-11-12
)

Institutions
  
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Alma mater
  
University of Cambridge

Thesis
  
Stochastic Sequences of Events (1954)

Notable awards
  
Adams Prize (1960) Guggenheim Fellowship

Education
  
University of Cambridge (1953), University of Cambridge (1947), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Awards
  
Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada

Doctoral advisor
  
Henry Daniels, David Cox

Walter Laws "Wally" Smith (born November 12, 1926) is a British-born American mathematician, known for his contributions to applied probability theory.

Contents

Biography

He was born in London.

Smith received his BSc in mathematics (1947) from Cambridge University, going on to earn an M.Sc. (1951) and PhD (1953) from the same university. His dissertation was entitled Stochastic Sequences of Events advised by Henry Daniels and D. R. Cox, with whom he published the book Queues (1961) and also published with in his early years. He worked at The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (1954–56 and 1958–), where he is now an emeritus in the department of statistics and operations research. He is fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, fellow of the American Statistical Association (1966), winner of the Adams Prize at the University of Cambridge (1960), Sir Winston Churchill overseas fellow and receiver of a Guggenheim Fellowship (see List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1974)

Publications

  • The superimposition of several strictly periodic sequences of events, in Biometrika, 40(?), 1953. With Cox.
  • A direct proof of a fundamental theorem of renewal theory, in Skandinavisk Aktuartidsskrift, 36(?), 1953
  • On the superposition of renewal processes, in Biometrika, 41(1–2):91–99, 1954. With Cox.
  • A note on truncation and sufficient statistics in The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 28(1):247–252, 1957
  • On the distribution of Tribolium confusum in a container, in Biometrika, 44(?), 1957. With Cox.
  • Renewal theory and its ramafications, in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 20(2):243–302, 1958
  • On the elementary renewal theorem for non-identically distributed variables, in Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 14(2):673–699, 1964
  • Congestion Theory, Proceedings of the Symposium on Congestion Theory, The University of North Carolina Monograph Series in Probability and Statistics., 1965. With William E. Wilkinson (editors).
  • Necessary conditions for almost sure extinction of a branching process with random environment, Annals of Mathematical Statistics,. 39(?):2136–2140, 1968
  • Branching processes in Markovian environments in Duke Mathematical Journal 38(4):749–763, 1971. With William E. Wilkinson
  • Harold Hotelling 1895–1973 in The Annals of Statistics, 6(6):1173–1183, 1978
  • On transient regenerative processes in Journal of Applied Probability, 23(?):52–70, 1986. With E. Murphree.
  • References

    Wally Smith (mathematician) Wikipedia