Walter L. Smith

Walter Laws Smith is an American mathematician, known for his contributions to applied probability theory.

Smith received his B.Sc. in mathematics (1947) from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He then moved to England to earn an M.Sc. (1951) and Ph.D. (1953) from
University of Cambridge. His dissertation was entitled "Stochastic Sequences of Events" advised by Henry Daniels and
D. R. Cox, with whom he published the book "Queues" (1961) and also published with in his early years. [ [http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=42167 entry] at Mathematics Genealogy Project] He worked at Chapel Hill (1954-56 and 1958-), where he is now an emeritus in the department of statistics and operations research. [ [http://www.stat.unc.edu/faculty/wsmith.html homepage] at unc.edu] He is fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, fellow of the American Statistical Association (1966),winner of the Adams Prize at the University of Cambridge (1960),Sir Winston Churchill overseas fellow andreceiver of a Guggenheim Fellowship (see List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1974)

Publications

*"The superimposition of several strictly periodic sequences of events", in Biometrika, 40(?), 1953. With Cox.
*"A direct proof of a fundamental theorem of renewal theory", in Skandinavisk Aktuartidsskrift, 36(?), 1953
*"On the superposition of renewal processes] ", in Biometrika, 41(1-2):91-99, 1954. With Cox.
*"A note on truncation and sufficient statistics" in The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 28(1):247-252, 1957
*"On the distribution of Tribolium confusum in a container", in Biometrika, 44(?), 1957. With Cox.
*"Renewal theory and its ramafications", in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 20(2):243-302, 1958
*"On the elementary renewal theorem for non-identically distributed variables", in Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 14(2):673-699, 1964
*"Congestion Theory", Proceedings of the Symposium on Congestion Theory, The University of North Carolina Monograph Series in Probabiliy and Statistics., 1965. With William E. Wilkinson (editors).
*"Necessary conditions for almost sure extinction of a branching process with random environment", Annals of Mathematical Statistics,. 39(?):2136-2140, 1968
*"Branching processes in Markovian environments" in Duke Mathematical Journal 38(4):749-763, 1971. With William E. Wilkinson
*"Harold Hotelling 1895-1973" in The Annals of Statistics, 6(6):1173-1183, 1978
*"On transient regenerative processes" in Journal of Applied Probability, 23(?):52-70, 1986. With E. Murphree.

References