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THE LIFE of ABRAHAM W ALD Abraham Wald Was Born October

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THE LIFE of ABRAHAM W ALD Abraham Wald Was Born October THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM W ALD Abraham Wald was born October 31, 1902, in Cluj, Rumania. His entire elementary and secondary school education was obtained at home, mainly under the direction of an older brother. Mter graduating from the local university in Cluj, he went to Vienna, entering the University of Vienna in 1927. Here he studied mathematics, particularly geometry, and contributed to the colloquium led by Karl Menger. Mter receiving his Ph.D. in 1931, W ald could not find an academic post because of religious prejudice; he began work in econometrics first with Karl Schlesinger, a banker and economist, and then with Oskar Morgenstern at the Business Cycle Research Institute. By 1938 the rise of Nazism made life in Vienna untenable for Wald. In the summer of that year he came to the United States as a fellow of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, and in the fall he came to Columbia University on a fellowship of the Carnegie Corporation. He began intensive study of modern statistical inference under the tutelage of Harold Hotelling. It was not long before Wald began research in statistics; in fact, his path­ breaking paper in decision theory {37} was written during this academic year. In the following academic year (1939-1940) Wald lectured in statistics while Hotelling was absent on sabbatical leave; this was the beginning of Wald's pedagogical career at Columbia. In 1941 he was made an assistant professor of economics, in 1943 an associate professor, and in 1944 a professor. In 1946 when Hotelling was called to the University of North Carolina, Columbia met the possibility of Wald also leaving by setting up a Department of Mathe­ matical Statistics with Wald as executive officer. In 1941 Wald married Lucille Lang. A daughter, Betty, was born in 1943, and a son, Robert, was born in 1947. In the fall of 1950, Wald and his wife traveled to India for a lecture tour. It was on one leg of this trip that they met their deaths in a plane crash. A fuller biography of Wald is given in papers by J. Wolfowitz and Karl Menger in the March issue of the 1952 (Wald Memorial) volume of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 1 These papers also survey W aid's work in statistics and geometry; another paper in that issue by G. Tintner2 surveys Wald's contributions to econometrics. 1 J. Wolfowitz, "Abraham Wald, 1902-1950," Annals of Math. Stat., Vol. 23 (1952), pp. 1-13. K. Menger, "The formative years of Abraham Wald and his work in geometry," Annals of Math. Stat., Vol. 23 (1952), pp. 14-20. 1 G. Tintner, "Abraham Wa.ld's contributions to econometrics," Annals of Math. Stat., Vol. 23 (1952), pp. 21-28. J. Rojo (ed.), Selected Works of E. L. Lehmann, Selected Works in Probability 843 and Statistics, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-1412-4_67, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.
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