Thomas S. Ferguson

For the archeologist and Book of Mormon scholar, see Thomas Stuart Ferguson.

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	(1929-12-14) December 14, 1929 (age 95) 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.math.ucla.edu/~tom/

Education and career

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] He was the supervisor of numerous doctorates.^[2]

Contributions

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]

Recognition

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]

Personal life

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.