Charles "Chuck" Joel Stone (July 13, 1936 – April 16, 2019) was an American statistician and mathematician.

Early life

Charles Joel Stone was born and raised in

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

. After secondary school at

North Hollywood High School North Hollywood High School (NHHS) is a public high school in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. It is in the San Fernando Valley and enrolls approximately 2,500 students. Several neighborhoods, including m ...

, Stone graduated with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

in science from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

in 1958. He then matriculated at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, where in 1961 he received his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in statistics. His PhD thesis ''Limit Theorems for Birth and Death Processes and Diffusion Processes'' was supervised by

Samuel Karlin Samuel Karlin (June 8, 1924 – December 18, 2007) was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century. Education and career Karlin was born in Janów, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodo ...

Career

From 1962 to 1964 Stone was an assistant professor in the mathematics department of

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

. From 1964 1981 to he was a faculty member of the mathematics department of UCLA (

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

), where he worked extensively with

Leo Breiman Leo Breiman (January 27, 1928 – July 5, 2005) was an American statistician at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Breiman's work helped to bridge the gap between statistics an ...

(who moved to Berkeley in 1980) and Sidney Charles Port (born 1935). In the statistics department of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, Stone was from 1981 a full professor, a position which he held until his retirement as professor emeritus. When they were professors at UCLA, Stone and Breiman consulted for Technology Services Corporation in Santa Monica. Based on their work, they co-authored a 1978 technical report, ''Parsimonious Binary Classification Trees'', Elaborating on the report, in 1984 they published, with two more co-authors,

Jerome H. Friedman Jerome Harold Friedman (born December 29, 1939) is an American statistician, consultant and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University, known for his contributions in the field of statistics and data mining.

and Richard Allen Oshlen (born 1942), a greatly expended version entitled ''Classification and Regression Trees''. In addition to research on statistical algorithms, Stone did research on potential theory, "local limit theorems, weak convergence of stochastic processes, and renewal theory." Stone was the advisor for 14 doctoral students, including Probal Chaudhuri, Michael P. Cohen, Mark Henry Hansen, and James Stephen "Steve" Marron. Stone was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1980–1981. In 1986 he was an invited speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the IMU Abacus Medal (known before ...

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

. He was elected a Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts ...

in 1970 and a Fellow of the Class of 2013 (announced in 2012) of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. He was elected a Member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

in 1993.

Personal life

In June 1966 he married Barbara L. Cohn in Los Angeles. They had two sons.

Death

Stone died on April 16, 2019.

Selected publications

Articles

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Books

* (textbook) * (textbook) * (textbook) * * ** *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stone, Charles Joel 1936 births 2019 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences North Hollywood High School alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Stanford University alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Cornell University faculty American mathematical statisticians