Lawrence Alan Shepp (September 9, 1936
Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn () is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Kings County is the most populous Administrative divisions of New York (state)#County, county i ...
– April 23, 2013,
Tucson, AZ) was an American
mathematician, specializing in
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 ...
and computational
tomography.
Shepp obtained his PhD from
Princeton University in 1961 with a dissertation entitled ''Recurrent Sums of Random Variables''. His advisor was
William Feller. He joined
Bell Laboratories in 1962. He joined
Rutgers University in 1997. He joined
University of Pennsylvania in 2010.
His work in tomography has had biomedical imaging applications, and he has also worked as professor of radiology at
Columbia University (1973–1996), as a mathematician in the radiology service of
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
Awards and honors
* 2014:
IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award
* 2012: Became a fellow of the
American Mathematical Society.
* 1992: Elected member of the Institute of Medicine
* 1989: Elected member of the
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
* 1979: IEEE Distinguished Scientist Award in 1979
* 1979:
Lester R. Ford Award
Lester is an ancient Anglo-Saxon surname and given name. Notable people and characters with the name include:
People
Given name
* Lester Bangs (1948–1982), American music critic
* Lester W. Bentley (1908–1972), American artist from Wisc ...
(with
Joseph Kruskal
Joseph Bernard Kruskal, Jr. (; January 29, 1928 – September 19, 2010) was an American mathematician, statistician, computer scientist and psychometrician.
Personal life
Kruskal was born to a Jewish family in New York City to a successful fur ...
)
See also
*
Fishburn–Shepp inequality
In combinatorial mathematics, the XYZ inequality, also called the Fishburn–Shepp inequality, is an inequality for the number of linear extensions of finite partial orders. The inequality was conjectured by Ivan Rival and Bill Sands in 1981. It ...
*
Shepp–Logan phantom
The Shepp–Logan phantom is a standard test image created by Larry Shepp and Benjamin F. Logan for their 1974 paper ''The Fourier Reconstruction of a Head Section''. It serves as the model of a human head in the development and testing of image ...
*
Shepp–Olkin conjecture
*
Coupon collector's problem
In probability theory, the coupon collector's problem describes "collect all coupons and win" contests. It asks the following question: If each box of a brand of cereals contains a coupon, and there are ''n'' different types of coupons, what is th ...
*
Discrete tomography
*
Dubins path
*
Gaussian process
In probability theory and statistics, a Gaussian process is a stochastic process (a collection of random variables indexed by time or space), such that every finite collection of those random variables has a multivariate normal distribution, i.e. e ...
*
Hook length formula
In combinatorial mathematics, the hook length formula is a formula for the number of standard Young tableaux whose shape is a given Young diagram.
It has applications in diverse areas such as representation theory, probability, and algorithm analy ...
*
Parallel parking problem
The parallel parking problem is a motion planning problem in control theory and mechanics to determine the path a car must take to parallel park into a parking space. The front wheels of a car are permitted to turn, but the rear wheels must stay ...
*
Sieve estimator
*
Ridge function
In mathematics, a ridge function is any function f:\R^d\rightarrow\R that can be written as the composition of a univariate function with an affine transformation, that is: f(\boldsymbol) = g(\boldsymbol\cdot \boldsymbol) for some g:\R\rightarrow\ ...
References
External links
*
Obituary at Penn
Princeton University alumni
Rutgers University faculty
University of Pennsylvania faculty
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
American statisticians
Probability theorists
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
1936 births
2013 deaths
Members of the National Academy of Medicine
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