Lawrence David (Larry) Brown (16 December 1940 – 21 February 2018) was Miers Busch Professor and Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is known for his groundbreaking work in a broad range of fields including decision theory, recurrence and partial differential equations, nonparametric function estimation, minimax and adaptation theory, and the analysis of census data and call-center data.

Career

Brown was educated at the California Institute of Technology and Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1964. He earned numerous honors, including election to the United States National Academy of Sciences, and published widely, beginning with his Ph.D. research, which made major advances in admissibility. He was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1992–93. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. After having been assistant professor at University of California at Berkeley, associate professor at Cornell University – with the latter move entailing a change from a statistics to a mathematics department, allowing him to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War – and professor at Cornell University and Rutgers University, he was invited to join the Department of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Personal life

Brown was born in Los Angeles to parents Louis M. Brown and Hermione Brown. He was married to Linda Zhao, a fellow statistician at the Wharton School.

Honors and awards

In his honor

Selected publications

Books