Laurence Alan Baxter (28 February 1954, in London – 8 November 1996, in

Long Island Long Island is a densely populated island in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, part of the New York metropolitan area. With over 8 million people, Long Island is the most populous island in the United Sta ...

) was professor of

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

at the

State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

Early life

Baxter was born at the Bearstead Jewish Maternity Hospital,

Stoke Newington Stoke Newington is an area occupying the north-west part of the London Borough of Hackney in north-east London, England. It is northeast of Charing Cross. The Manor of Stoke Newington gave its name to Stoke Newington the ancient parish. The ...

. His family lived in Ilford, Essex. He was educated at University College London (UCL).

Career

Baxter's first job (1975–1977) was at an insurance company. He then went to the Central Electricity Generating Board, where he researched ways to predict the available generator capacity given the incidence of breakdowns and the average time required for generator repairs. This work was accepted by UCL for a Ph.D. in 1980. Baxter was then offered a temporary post as a lecturer at the University of Delaware. The following year, he moved to the

(SUNY) where he was granted tenure about ten years before his death. Leitmann (1997) reports that "Baxter was internationally renowned for his work in applied probability and reliability theory" and that he "published over 45 papers and did extensive consulting in this area". He further argues that the "results of his work on separately maintained components have been incorporated into a widely used AT&T Bell Laboratories software package for calculating various characteristics of system availability". Leitmann also notes that Baxter provided extensions to several classic theories in reliability theory naming these '' continuum structure functions (CSFs)''. Also that he researched air pollutions impact on mortality.George Leitmann
''In Memoriam: Laurence Alan Baxter''.
Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, vol. 210 (1997), no. 2, pp. 417–418 Baxter conceived the idea for and was editor-in-chief of the book series ''Stochastic Modeling'', published by Chapman and Hall from 1993. He was an editorial board member for ''Applied Probability Newsletter'', ''Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics'', the ''Journal of Mathematical Analysis and its Applications'', ''Naval Research Logistics'' and the ''International Journal of Operations and Quantitative Management''. SUNY established the annual Laurence Baxter Memorial Lecture, which is now given each April at Stony Brook.

Notes and references

{{DEFAULTSORT:Baxter, Laurence 1954 births 1996 deaths Jewish scientists English statisticians 20th-century English mathematicians People educated at Ilford County High School Alumni of University College London People from Ilford Stony Brook University faculty English Jews