Efron Receives National Medal of Science

On May 29, 2007, President to understand new models for empirical Bayes and George W. Bush announced the Stein estimation, and for estimating the number of recipients of the 2005 National an unseen species.” Medal of Science. Among the Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1938, Efron eight medalists is Bradley earned his doctorate in statistics from Stanford in Efron, the Max H. Stein Profes- 1964 and joined the Stanford faculty in 1965. He sor and Professor of Statistics received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983. His other and of Health Research and Policy honors include the Wilks Medal, the Parzen Prize, at Stanford University. Efron was and the Rao Prize, as well as membership in the U.S. cited “for his contributions to National Academy of Sciences and the American theoretical and applied statistics, Academy of Arts and Sciences. Efron has served as especially the bootstrap sampling president of both the American Statistical Associa- technique; for his extraordinary tion and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. geometric insight into nonlinear In January 2007 he delivered the lecture “Baseball, statistical problems; and for ap- Shakespeare, and Modern Statistical Theory” at the Bradley Efron plications in medicine, physics Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans. and astronomy.” The National Medal of Science is the country’s The Notices asked Carl Morris highest distinction for contributions to scientific of Harvard University to describe briefly Efron’s research. According to a news release from the work. Morris responded: “Brad Efron is renowned Office of Science and Technology Policy, “The as a quintessential, theoretical, mathematical, inter- National Medal of Science honors individuals for disciplinary, and applied statistician. His foreseeing pioneering scientific research in a range of fields, the onset of cheap and fast computation inspired including physical, biological, mathematical, so- his most famous breakthrough in 1979, the ‘boot- cial, behavioral, and engineering sciences, that strap’, which marks the onset of the computer- enhances our understanding of the world and intensive age in statistics. The bootstrap, further leads to innovations and technologies that give the developed in his 1982 and 1993 books, allows data United States its global economic edge.” The Na- analysts to assess the long-run performances of tional Science Foundation administers the award, their statistical procedures, each in the context of which was established by Congress in 1959. the observed data set, by recalculating the statisti- Other mathematical scientists receiving the cal procedure on thousands of randomly chosen National Medal of Science in the past decade are: ‘bootstrap samples’. Louis Nirenberg (1995); Richard Karp and Ste- “While Efron’s celebrated work on linear and phen J. Smale (1996); S.-T. Yau (1997); Cathleen S. curved exponential families and on statistical Morawetz (1998); Felix E. Browder, Ronald Coif- information principally has drawn from math- man, and Leo Kadanoff (1999); John G. Thompson ematical statistics, many of his pioneering ideas and Karen K. Uhlenbeck (2000); Calyampudi R. Rao have stemmed from his regular interactions with and Elias M. Stein (2001); James G. Glimm and Ed- real scientific data. These especially include theo- ward Witten (2002); Carl de Boor and Duncan Luce retical advances for micro-array, survival, clinical (2003); and Dennis Sullivan (2004). trial, and drug compliance data in biostatistics, —Allyn Jackson and for red-shift measurements in astrophysics. He even has used baseball data and counts on Shakespeare’s vocabulary for inspiration and for context when explaining theoretical advances and

September 2007 Notices of the AMS 999