Lucien Le Cam is currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and
Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born on November
18, 1924, in Croze, Creuse, France. He received a Licence es Sciences from the
University of Paris in 1945, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of
California at Berkeley in 1952. He has been on the faculty of the Statistics
Department at Berkeley since 1952 except for a year in Montreal, Canada, as the
Director of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (1972--1973). He
served as Chairman of the Department of Statistics at Berkeley
(1961–1965) and was coeditor with J. Neyman of the Berkeley
Symposia.
¶ Professor Le Cam is the principal architect of the modern asymptotic
theory of statistics and has also made numerous other contributions. He
developed a mathematical system that substantially extended Wald's statistical
decision theory to the version being used today. With his introduction of the
distance between experiments, we now have a coherent statistical theory that
links the asymptotics and the statistical decision theory. Encompassed in the
theory are the concepts of contiguity, asymptotic sufficiency, a new method of
constructing estimators (the onestep estimator), the theory of local
asymptotic normality (LAN), metric dimension and numerous other seminal ideas.
The metric dimension, introduced in 1973, has been found to be fundamentally
important in studying nonparametric or semiparametric problems. This monumental
work culminated in a big book, Asymptotic Methods in Statistical Decision
Theory, published by Springer in 1986.
¶ Professor Le Cam's scientific contributions are not limited to
theoretical statistics. At age 23 he introduced the characteristic functional
technique (after Kolmogorov, but independently) to study the spatial and
temporal distribution of rainfall and its relation to stream flow. It resulted
in a model known as Le Cam’s model in hydrology. In the domain of
probability theory, he was one of the early contributors to the study of
convergence of measures in topological spaces. He refined the approximation
theorems and the concentration inequalities of Kolmogorov and made extensions
of these results to infinitedimensional spaces. We also owe to him the
introduction of the concepts of $\tau$-smooth, and $\sigma$smooth that
are widely used today.
¶ In honor of his 70th birthday in 1994, a weeklong workshop
and a conference were held at Yale University, organized by Professor David
Pollard. In addition, a Festschrift for Le Cam, Research Papers in
Probability and Statistics Papers, was published by Springer in 1997. He is
married to Louise Romig, the daughter of a founder of statistical quality
control, Harry Romig. They have three grown children, Denis, Steven and Linda.