Charles Joel Stone


Charles "Chuck" Joel Stone was an American statistician and mathematician.

Early life

Charles Joel Stone was born and raised in Los Angeles. After secondary school at North Hollywood High School, Stone graduated with a Bachelor of Science in science from the California Institute of Technology in 1958. He then matriculated at Stanford University, where in 1961 he received his PhD in statistics. His PhD thesis Limit Theorems for Birth and Death Processes and Diffusion Processes was supervised by Samuel Karlin.

Career

From 1962 to 1964 Stone was an assistant professor in the mathematics department of Cornell University. From 1964 1981 to he was a faculty member of the mathematics department of UCLA, where he worked extensively with Leo Breiman and Sidney Charles Port. In the statistics department of the University of California, Berkeley, 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 and Richard Allen Oshlen, 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 Cohen (statistician), 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 in Berkeley, California. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1970 and a Fellow of the Class of 2013 of the American Mathematical Society.
He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences 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

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