Milton Sobel (August 30, 1919 – December 31, 2002) was professor emeritus of statistics at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

.Nitis Mukhopadhyay
A Conversation with Milton Sobel
''Statistical Science'', 2000, Vol. 15, No. 2, 168–190 He made notable contributions in the areas of decision theory, sequential analysis, selection and ranking,

reliability analysis Reliability, reliable, or unreliable may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Computing * Data reliability (disambiguation), a property of some disk arrays in computer storage * High availability * Reliability (computer networking), a ...

, combinatorial problems, and

Dirichlet process In probability theory, Dirichlet processes (after the distribution associated with Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet) are a family of stochastic processes whose realizations are probability distributions. In other words, a Dirichlet process is a pro ...

es. Of particular note are his contributions in selection and ranking, sequential analysis and reliability. He obtained his B.A. in mathematics (1940) from the

City College of New York The City College of the City University of New York (also known as the City College of New York, or simply City College or CCNY) is a public university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, Cit ...

, M.A. in mathematics (1946) and Ph.D. in mathematical statistics (advisor: Abraham Wald, 1951) from Columbia University. During 1960-1975 he was Professor of Statistics at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

Books

*1985: Selected Tables in Mathematical Statistics: Dirchlet Integrals of Type 2 and Their Applications (with V. R. R. Uppuluri , K. Frankowski) *1977: Selecting and Ordering Populations (with

Jean D. Gibbons Jean Dickinson Gibbons (née Dickinson, born 1938)Birthdate froWorldcat/ref> is an American statistician, an expert in nonparametric statistics and an author of books on statistics. She was the first chair of the Committee on Women in Statistics of ...

and Ingram Olkin) *1968: Sequential Identification and Ranking Procedures (with Robert E. Bechhofer and Jack C. Kiefer)

Honors

*Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1956) *Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1958) * Guggenheim Fellowship (1967–1968)"Milton Sobel"
/ref> * NIH Fellowship (1968–1969) *Elected membership in the International Statistical Institute (1974)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sobel, Milton 1919 births 2002 deaths University of California, Santa Barbara faculty University of Minnesota faculty Columbia University alumni Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Elected Members of the International Statistical Institute Statistics educators Jewish American academics American statisticians 20th-century American Jews 21st-century American Jews