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

Education and career

Dudley was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his BA at Harvard College and received his PhD at Princeton University in 1962 under the supervision of Edward Nelson and Gilbert Hunt. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1958. He was an instructor and assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley between 1962 and 1967, before moving to MIT 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 and statistics, especially empirical processes. 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.

Books