Emanuel Parzen, American statistician, Died at 86

  Reseacher

Emanuel Parzen was born on April 21, 1929, in Boca Raton, Florida and died on February 6, 2016.

He was an American statistician.

Emanuel has worked and published on signal detection theory and time series analysis, where he pioneered the use of kernel density estimation (also known as the Parzen window in his honor).

He was the recipient of the 1994 Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Medal of the American Statistical Association.

He received his education at the Bronx High School of Science.

He then joined Harvard, where he earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1949.

From there, Emanuel Parzen went on to Berkeley, earning his master and doctorate degrees in mathematics in 1951 and 1953, respectively.

Emanuel Parzen dissertation, “On Uniform Convergence of Families of Sequences of Random Variables”, was written under Michel Loève.

Mr. Parzen went straight into academia after graduate school, first toiled as a research scientist in the physics department and assistant professor of mathematical statistics at Columbia University.

He left there in 1956 for Stanford University, where he stayed for the next 14 years.

At this time, he wrote what has become one of the classical texts in probability theory.

In 1970, Parzen received the position at the chair of the statistics department at SUNY Buffalo and in 1978 moved to his current post as a Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University.

Emanuel son, Michael Parzen, was a Senior Lecturer of Statistics at Harvard University.

Emanuel Parzen passed away at 86 yrs old.