Richard Mansfield Dudley (July 28, 1938 – January 19, 2020) was Professor of Mathematics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

Education and career

Dudley was born in

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...

. He earned his BA at

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher lea ...

and received his PhD at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

in 1962 under the supervision of

Edward Nelson Edward Nelson (May 4, 1932 – September 10, 2014) was an American mathematician. He was professor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He was known for his work on mathematical physics and mathematical logic. In mathematical ...

and

Gilbert Hunt Gilbert Agnew Hunt, Jr. (March 4, 1916 – May 30, 2008) was an American mathematician and amateur tennis player active in the 1930s and 1940s. Early life and education Hunt was born in Washington, D.C. and attended Eastern High School (Washing ...

. He was a

Putnam Fellow The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada (regard ...

in 1958. He was an instructor and assistant professor at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

between 1962 and 1967, before moving to

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

as a professor in mathematics, where he stayed from 1967 until 2015, when he retired. He died on January 19, 2020, following a long illness.

Research

His work mainly concerned fields of probability, mathematical statistics, and machine learning, with highly influential contributions to the theory of Gaussian processes and empirical processes. He published over a hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals and authored several books. His specialty was

probability theory Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set o ...

and

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 ...

, especially

empirical process In probability theory, an empirical process is a stochastic process that describes the proportion of objects in a system in a given state. For a process in a discrete state space a population continuous time Markov chain or Markov population model ...

es. He is often noted for his results on the so-called ''Dudley entropy integral''. In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2012-11-10.

Books

* * * *

References

* R. S. Wenocur and R. M. Dudley, "Some special Vapnik–Chervonenkis classes," ''

Discrete Mathematics Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a bijection with the set of natural numbers) rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous f ...

'', vol. 33, pp. 313–318, 1981.

External links

Publications
from

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

.
A Conversation with Dick Dudley
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dudley, Richard M. 1938 births 2020 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American statisticians Probability theorists Princeton University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the American Statistical Association Putnam Fellows Harvard College alumni Annals of Probability editors Mathematical statisticians