Eugene Lukacs
Eugene Lukacs ( born 14 August 1906 in Szombathely, Hungary, † December 21, 1987 in Washington, DC; actually Jenő Lukács ) was an American mathematician of Hungarian origin. Its main areas of work were the insurance mathematics and stochastics, in particular the theory of characteristic functions.
Life
Eugene Lukacs grew up in Vienna, where his father worked as a bank clerk. He began in 1925 a study of mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Vienna, but he broke off to study at the University of Vienna mathematics. Among his teachers were Eduard Helly, Leopold Vietoris, Wilhelm Wirtinger and Hans Hahn. He received his doctorate in 1930 with a thesis on a geometric theme, 1931, he obtained a further degree in Actuarial Statistics. Then he worked, among other things, for economic reasons, first as a teacher at a secondary school in Vienna. In 1933 he accepted a position as an actuary at an insurance company in which his former teacher Eduard Helly was already working. In 1937 he left the insurance company and taught mathematics at the community college Vienna.
Lukacs married in 1935 Elizabeth Weisz, whom he had met in 1927 at the University of Vienna during their mathematics and physics studies. After Hitler's invasion of Austria in March 1938, he prepared, how many Austrian and German Jewish origin, his move to the United States. Elizabeth Lukacs left Austria in late 1938, Eugene Lukacs followed her in February 1939. He worked as a teacher of higher mathematics at a high school in Baltimore ( 1940-1942 ) and taught physics and mathematics as an assistant professor at Illinois College, Jacksonville (1942 ) and as an associate professor at Berea College, Kentucky ( 1944).
1945 Lukacs received the U.S. citizenship and became a professor at the University of Cincinnati. There he worked with Otto Szász and wrote him several joint work on probability theory. From 1948 to 1955 Lukacs worked at the National Bureau of Standards and Head of the Statistics Department at the Office of Naval Research, in addition he has lectured at several universities.
In 1955 he was appointed professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, where he in 1959 became head of the Statistical Laboratory. This facility has developed into a major research center, at the Lukacs together with mathematicians such as Harald Cramér, John von Neumann, Alfréd Rényi, Paul Lévy, Ronald Fisher, Paul Erdős, Jacob Wolfowitz and William Feller worked.
Eugene Lukacs was retired in 1972 at the Catholic University and then worked for another four years with his colleagues Radha Govinda Laha and Vijay Kumar Rohatgi at Bowling Green State University, where he continued the Statistical Laboratory.
Scientific Work
Eugene Lukacs made in the first years of his scientific activity, in particular contributions to actuarial science, which he wrote about 20 publications. After his arrival in the U.S. he heard in 1940 at Columbia University New York lectures of Abraham Wald, whom he had met in Vienna. This Lukacs began to be interested in statistics and probability theory, and has since worked almost exclusively in this area. He succeeded, deploy functional theory and methods for solving problems of stochastic. He examined analytical properties characteristic functions to close these properties to the associated distribution functions and thus the tested random variables. He formulated a number of characterization sets for normally distributed and gamma distributed random variables. His analytical studies based mainly on infinitely divisible and stable distribution functions.
Residencies and visiting professor Lukacs several times to Europe. 1961/1962 he worked at the Sorbonne, Paris, the Swiss Federal Institute of Zurich and the universities of Brussels and Athens. In the years 1965/1966 he came again to the Sorbonne and at the University of Applied Sciences Vienna, and later at the Universities of Hull ( 1971) and Sheffield ( 1974/1975 ), the University of Applied Arts Vienna ( 1975-1977 ) and the University of Erlangen ( 1977/1978 ). Several times he was staying at the Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach. In 1980 he was head of a conference on Analytical methods in probability.
Lukacs was co-editor of several journals, as the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Annals of Mathematical Statistics, the Journal of Multivariate Analysis and Academic Press Series Probability and Mathematical Statistics, which he founded in 1960 together with Zygmunt William Birnbaum.
Awards and honors
Eugene Lukacs in 1957 member of the " Institute of Mathematical Statistics ", 1958, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1969 American Statistical Association and in 1973 the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
In 1981 on the occasion of his 75th birthday an anthology of 22 articles by 34 authors.
After his death, Lukacs was honored in a special degree by the Bowling Green State University. A Eugene Lukacs Visiting Professorship (Eugene Lukacs Distinguished Visiting Professor ) was established in 1991, on the for one or two semesters of an internationally known scientist is appointed. These included Anatoli Skorokhod (1993/1994) and C. Radhakrishna Rao (1996/ 1997). From 1991 to 1999, Eugene Lukacs Symposium with international participation was held at Bowling Green State University annually.
Writings
Eugene Lukacs wrote over 110 papers in international journals. His published books as main works are:
- Characteristic functions. Griffin, London 1960. 2nd edition 1970, ISBN 0-852-64170-2.
- Radha G. Laha: Applications of characteristic functions. Griffin, London 1964.
- Probability and mathematical statistics. An introduction. Academic Press, New York 1972, ISBN 0-12-459850-1.
- Stochastic convergence. 2nd edition. Academic Press, New York, 1975, ISBN 0-12-459860-9.
- Developments in characteristic function theory. Macmillan, New York 1983, ISBN 0-02-848550-5, and Griffin, London 1983, ISBN 0-85264-271-7.