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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.[1]
Thomas S. Ferguson | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 14, 1929 Oakland, California, USA |
| Spouse | Beatriz Rossello |
| Children | Chris Ferguson |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Thesis | On the Existence of Linear Regression in Linear Structural Relations (1956) |
| Doctoral advisor | Lucien Le Cam |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Mathematical statistics Game theory |
| Institutions | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Doctoral students | Lynn Kuo |
| Website | www |
Ferguson was born in Oakland, California and was raised nearby in Alameda, California. He majored in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his Ph.D. there in 1956.[1] 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.[2]
After another year teaching at Berkeley, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1957.[1]
Ferguson is the author of:
- Mathematical Statistics: A Decision Theoretic Approach (Academic Press, 1967)[3]
- A Course in Large Sample Theory (Chapman & Hall, 1996)[4]
- A Course in Game Theory (World Scientific, 2020)[5]
His research contributions include the analysis of the "big match" zero-sum game with David Blackwell, 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; Ferguson's Dirichlet process;[1] Ferguson's pairing property in the analysis of misère subtraction games;[1][6] and contributions to the theory of optimal stopping as e.g. co-authored work on Robbins' problem.[1]
Ferguson was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1967,[1] and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1985. He was given the Belgian International Francqui Chair of Science in 1998. A festschrift in Ferguson's honor edited by F. Thomas Bruss and Lucien Le Cam was published in 2000.[1]
Ferguson married mathematician Beatriz Rossello, and is the father of poker player Chris Ferguson.[1][7] He has coauthored papers with Chris Ferguson on the mathematics of poker and other games of chance.
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