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Stephen Mitchell Samuels

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Stephen Mitchell Samuels (1938, Brooklyn – July 26, 2012, Indiana) was a statistician and mathematician, known for his work on the secretary problem[1] and for the Samuels Conjecture involving a Chebyshev-type inequality for sums of independent, non-negative random variables.[2][3]

After completing his undergraduate degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became a graduate student at Stanford University.[1] There he received his Ph.D. in 1964 with a thesis supervised by Samuel Karlin.[4] Samuels joined in 1964 the faculty of Purdue University and retired there in 2003 as professor emeritus of statistics and mathematics.[1] He did research on various topics in probability theory and its applications, dynamic optimization, and disclosure risk assessment for statistical microdata.[5]

Selected publications[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c "Obituary. Stephen Samuels". Lafayette Journal & Courier. July 27, 2012.
  2. ^ Paulin, Roland (2017). "On some conjectures of Samuels and Feige". arXiv:1703.05152 [math.PR].
  3. ^ Samuels, Stephen Mitchell (1966). "On a Chebyshev-type inequality for sums of independent random variables". The Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 37 (1): 248–259. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177699614. JSTOR 2238704. Samuels proved his conjecture for the case n = 3.
  4. ^ Stephen Mitchell Samuels at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ^ "Stephen M. Samuels, Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Mathematics". Purdue University.