January 31, 2019
Dear Members of our Campus Community,
I am saddened to share the news that Professor Emeritus David Hinkley has recently passed away. Our deepest sympathies are extended to his family. We are forever grateful for his collegiality and for his outstanding research and leadership contributions. I would like to share this tribute prepared by Chair Mike Ludkovski and our Department of Statistics and Applied Probability.
David Victor Hinkley 1945-2019
Distinguished Professor Emeritus David Victor Hinkley passed away January 11 in his home in Santa Barbara.
Professor Hinkley was born in 1945 in England and received his PhD in Statistics from Imperial College London in 1969 working with Sir DR Cox. After being on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Oxford in the UK he joined UCSB's Department of Statistics and Applied Probability as a Professor in 1995 and was active until his recent retirement in 2014. Professor Hinkley served as Chair of the department during 1995-2002.
David's research interests were in Statistics, where he made many fundamental contributions to the theory, methodology and practice of Statistics. He has worked on a wide range of areas including bootstrap, change points, likelihood theory and transformations. Professor Hinkley is perhaps best known as one of the pioneers of the Bootstrap method, which has been a seminal new idea that transformed computational methods. He was also a major contributor to formalizing the change-point problem which by now is widely used in applications covering quality control to climatology to threat detection. Professor Hinkley has collaborated with scientists and published in journals such as Science and Evolutionary Ecology.
Professor Hinkley authored two highly influential books, Bootstrap Methods and their Application with A. Davison and Theoretical Statistics with Sir DR Cox which became a widely adopted graduate textbook. Over his career he authored more than 90 articles and book chapters, including many in top journals such as Journal of the American Statistical Association and Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. He also served Editor of two leading statistical journals: Annals of Statistics and Biometrika.
Professor Hinkley was recognized early on for his research contributions, receiving in 1984 the COPSS (Council of Presidents of the Statistical Societies) Presidents' Medal, the most prestigious Statistics award to recipients under 40. Among his distinctive honors is Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society.
Among his numerous contributions to our Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, Professor Hinkley was the Department Chair for seven years during 1995-2002 and the Director of Undergraduate Studies during 2003-2007. In his earlier career he also chaired the Department of Applied Statistics at University of Minnesota, was the Head of Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford, and the Jane and Ronald Blumberg Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. David was also deeply involved in the campus community, serving on the Executive Committee of the College of Letters and Science, as Chair of the Salary Equity Analysis Team, and on multiple Search Committees for Dean and AVC.
Our campus flag is lowered in his honor today.
Sincerely,
Henry T. Yang
Chancellor