Thomas Shelburne Ferguson (born December 14, 1929) is an American mathematician and statistician. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics and statistics at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

Education and career

Ferguson was born in

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

and was raised nearby in

Alameda, California Alameda ( ; ; Spanish for "Avenue (landscape), tree-lined path") is a city in Alameda County, California, located in the East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), East Bay region of the Bay Area. The city is primarily located on Alameda (island), Alam ...

. He majored in mathematics at the

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 ...

, and completed his Ph.D. there in 1956. His dissertation had two separately-titled parts, ''On Existence of Linear Regression in Linear Structural Relations'' and ''A Method of Generating Best Asymptotically Normal Estimates with Application to the Estimation of Bacterial Densities''; it was supervised by

Lucien Le Cam Lucien Marie Le Cam (November 18, 1924 – April 25, 2000) was a mathematician and statistician. Biography Le Cam was born November 18, 1924 in Croze, France. His parents were farmers, and unable to afford higher education for him; his father die ...

. After another year teaching at Berkeley, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1957.

Contributions

Ferguson is the author of: *''Mathematical Statistics: A Decision Theoretic Approach'' (Academic Press, 1967) *''A Course in Large Sample Theory'' (Chapman & Hall, 1996) *''A Course in Game Theory'' (World Scientific, 2020) His research contributions include the analysis of the "big match"

zero-sum game Zero-sum game is a mathematical representation in game theory and economic theory of a situation which involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one's gain is e ...

with

David Blackwell David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the ...

, a result that eventually led to the proof of existence of equilibrium values for limiting average payoff in all stochastic games; the Ferguson distribution on

prior probability In Bayesian statistical inference, a prior probability distribution, often simply called the prior, of an uncertain quantity is the probability distribution that would express one's beliefs about this quantity before some evidence is taken into ...

; Ferguson's

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 ...

; Ferguson's pairing property in the analysis of

misère Misère ( French for "destitution"), misere, bettel, betl, or (German for "beggar"; equivalent terms in other languages include , , ) is a bid in various card games, and the player who bids misère undertakes to win no tricks or as few as possi ...

subtraction game In combinatorial game theory, a subtraction game is an abstract strategy game whose state can be represented by a natural number or vector of numbers (for instance, the numbers of game tokens in piles of tokens, or the positions of pieces on board) ...

s; and contributions to the theory of

optimal stopping In mathematics, the theory of optimal stopping or early stopping : (For French translation, secover storyin the July issue of ''Pour la Science'' (2009).) is concerned with the problem of choosing a time to take a particular action, in order to ...

as e.g. co-authored work on Robbins' problem.

Recognition

Ferguson was named a Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

in 1967, and a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

in 1985. He was given the Belgian International Francqui Chair of Science in 1998. A

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

in Ferguson's honor edited by

F. Thomas Bruss Franz Thomas Bruss is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he had been director of "Mathématiques Générales" and co-director of the probability chair, and where he continues his research as invited profe ...

and

was published in 2000.

Personal life

Ferguson married mathematician Beatriz Rossello, and is the father of poker player

Chris Ferguson Christopher Philip Ferguson (born April 11, 1963) is an American professional poker player. He has won six World Series of Poker events, including the 2000 WSOP Main Event, and the 2008 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Ferguson is a ...

. He has coauthored papers with Chris Ferguson on the mathematics of poker and other games of chance.

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ferguson, Thomas S. 1929 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American statisticians University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty University of California, Los Angeles alumni Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics