Samuel Kotz

Samuel Kotz ( born August 30, 1930 in Harbin, China, † March 16, 2010 in Silver Spring, Maryland, United States) was an American statistician Russian- Jewish origin. He was known in the art by several standard works in statistics and probability theory, and was co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences.

Life

His father's family had fled the 1919 Russian Ufa to Harbin in Manchuria. Kotz grew up there and began to study electrical engineering. In 1949 he emigrated to Israel, where he was two years in the service of the army, mainly as an instructor in mathematics. After that, he began studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, graduating in 1956 from. Following this, he worked for the Israeli weather service. Through a contact with Jacob Wolfowitz, he got a scholarship from Cornell University, where he received his doctoral degree in 1960 with a scripture on information theory.

His first stop after that was 1962, the University of Chapel Hill. He was a research assistant in 1964 at the University of Toronto. In 1967 he became a professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia. His other stations were from 1979, the University of Maryland, College Park as a professor at the Faculty of Economics and, after his retirement in 1997, the Department of Operations Research at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. He died in 2010.

Research

Samuel Kotz has (co-) published as an author or editor of 47 monographs and encyclopedia volumes, among them three Russian- English scientific dictionaries, as well as over 280 other publications.

To date, he is known primarily through two extensive statistical standard works: