Founder of Statistics

Department dies at 88

Albert Hosmer Bowker, former Dean of Graduate Studies, died on Jan. 20 at the age of 88. The founder of the Department of Statistics, Bowker died from pancreatic cancer in a retirement home in Portola Valley.

Bowker, who earned a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT and a Ph.D. in statistics from Columbia, came to Stanford in 1947 as an assistant professor of mathematical statistics.

The statistician, who founded the Statistics Department in 1959, served as Dean of Graduate Studies from 1959 to 1963. Upon leaving the University in 1963, Bowker first served as chancellor of the City University of New York; he then served as chancellor of UC-Berkeley from 1971 to 1980.

In a 1998 Stanford News Service release, Bowker said, “I am prouder of the formation of [the Statistics department] than anything else I have done.”

Mathematician dies at 83

Influential Stanford math professor Sam Karlin died on Dec. 18 at the Stanford Hospital following a massive heart attack. He was 83. Karlin spent his last 20 years applying mathematics and statistical models to problems in biological sequence analysis.

His most significant contribution was a series of papers in the early 1990s with Stephen Altschul that laid the statistical groundwork for BLAST, the most popular piece of software in computational biology. Karlin was well-known for brilliance in mathematics, a passion for argument, a love for competition and a surprising skill for nurturing grad students.

Pneumonia claims EE Professor

Runner and mountain climber Alan Waterman died in Palo Alto on Jan. 9. He was 89. Waterman’s controversial work on radio waves incensed peacenik students during Vietnam-era turmoil over military research on the Stanford campus.

He specialized in how radio waves propagate through the atmosphere and are affected by turbulence and layers. During his time at Stanford, he erected antennas in the Dish area for experiments with microwave communications.