Hotelling Lectures
The Hotelling Lectures are an annual event in the Department of Statistics & Operations Research at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, honoring the memory of Professor Harold Hotelling (first chairman of the “Department of Mathematical Statistics”, as it was originally named at the time of its inception in 1946). A distinguished guest speaker presents a series of talks (which are open to the public) and remains in residence at the Department for several days. The inaugural Hotelling Lectures were given by David R. Cox in 1980, followed in subsequent years by these other distinguished speakers: Herman Chernoff, Ole Barndorff-Nielsen, Frank Hampel, David Brillinger, David Kendall, Persi Diaconis, Pal Revesz, Willem van Zwet, C.R. Rao, Bradley Efron, Lucien LeCam, Peter Bickel, Ulf Grenander, Larry Shepp, David Donoho, David Siegmund, Herbert Robbins, Lawrence D. Brown, Nancy Reid, S.R.S. Varadhan, Stuart Geman, Iain Johnstone, Peter Hall, Ruth J. Williams, Terry Speed, Thomas Kurtz, and Peter McCullagh.
Our upcoming Hotelling Lectures will be presented by Ward Whitt, Wai T. Chang Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. The first of two lectures will be given on Monday, March 14, 2011, followed by the second lecture on Wednesday, March 16, 2011, in room 120 of Hanes Hall.
Biography of this year's speaker:
Ever since completing his PhD in 1969 in operations research from Cornell University, Ward Whitt has conducted research on queueing models and their application to communication, computer, manufacturing and service systems. For 25 years, this research was done in research organizations of AT&T, including the Operations Research Center and the Mathematical Sciences Research Center of Bell Labs. Since 2002, Ward has been on the faculty of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. In 2007 he was selected by undergraduates in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia to receive the annual Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He has been active on the editorial boards of leading INFORMS and applied probability journals and is currently Advisory Editor for Operations Research and Mathematics of Operations Research. While teaching at Yale from 1969-1977 he held a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics.
Ward Whitt: A Deterministic Fluid Model for Service Systems with Many-Servers, Time-Varying Arrivals, Customer Abandonment and Non-Exponential Distributions of Service and Patience Times (joint work with Yunan Liu and Rouba Ibrahim)
Ward Whitt: Heavy-Traffic Limits via an Averaging Principle for Service Systems Responding to Unexpected Overloads (joint work with Ohad Perry)
