Richard Mansfield Dudley (July 28, 1938 – January 19, 2020) was Professor of Mathematics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

Education and career

Dudley was born in

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–United States border, Canada–U.S. maritime border ...

. He earned his BA at

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...

and received his PhD at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

in 1962 under the supervision of

Edward Nelson Edward Nelson (May 4, 1932 – September 10, 2014) was an American mathematician. He was professor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He was known for his work on mathematical physics and mathematical logic. In mathematical l ...

and Gilbert Hunt. He was a

Putnam Fellow The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada (regar ...

in 1958. He was an instructor and assistant professor at

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 ...

between 1962 and 1967, before moving to

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

as a professor in mathematics, where he stayed from 1967 until 2015, when he retired. He died on January 19, 2020, following a long illness.

Research

His work mainly concerned fields of probability, mathematical statistics, and machine learning, with highly influential contributions to the theory of Gaussian processes and empirical processes. He published over a hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals and authored several books. His specialty was

probability theory Probability theory or probability calculus is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expre ...

and

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

, especially

empirical process In probability theory, an empirical process is a stochastic process that characterizes the deviation of the empirical distribution function from its expectation. In mean field theory, limit theorems (as the number of objects becomes large) are con ...

es. He is often noted for his results on the so-called ''Dudley entropy integral''. In 2012 he became a fellow 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, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2012-11-10.

Books

* * () * * * ()

References

* R. S. Wenocur and R. M. Dudley, "Some special Vapnik–Chervonenkis classes," ''

Discrete Mathematics Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a bijection with the set of natural numbers) rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous f ...

'', vol. 33, pp. 313–318, 1981.

External links

Publications
from

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

.
A Conversation with Dick Dudley
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dudley, Richard M. 1938 births 2020 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American probability theorists Princeton University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the American Statistical Association Putnam Fellows Harvard College alumni Annals of Probability editors American mathematical statisticians