Conversations with Gabor J. Szekely
Abstract
Gabor J. Szekely was born in Budapest, Hungary on February 4, 1947. He graduated from Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE) with an M.S. degree in 1970, and a Ph.D. degree in 1971. He received his Candidate De-gree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1976, and the Doctor of Science Degree (D. Sc.) from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1986. Szekely joined the Department of Probability Theory of ELTE in 1970. In 1989, he became the founding chair of the Department of Stochastics of the Budapest Institute of Technology (Technical University of Budapest). In 1995, he moved to the United States as a tenured full professor at Bowl-ing Green State University (BGSU) in Bowling Green, Ohio. Before that, in 1990-1991, he was the first Lukacs Distinguished Professor at BGSU. Szekely had several visiting positions, for example, at the University of Am-sterdam in 1977 and at Yale University in 1989. Between 2006 and 2022, he served as a Program Director in the Statistics Program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Szekely has about 250 publications, including 6 books in several languages. In 1988, he received the Rollo Davidson Prize from Cambridge University, jointly with Imre Z. Ruzsa for their work on algebraic probability theory. In 2010, Szekely became an Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics mostly for his works dealing with physics concepts in statistics like energy statistics and distance correlation. He had the fortune to know and work with world-class mathematicians and statisticians like (in chronological order of their first meetings): P. Erdo ˝s, A. Renyi, Y. Linnik, B. de Finetti, A. N. Kol-mogorov, H. Robbins, G. Polya, L. Shepp, G. Wahba, C. R. Rao, B. Efron, P. Bickel and E. Seneta.
