Wally Smith (mathematician)

Walter Laws Smith was a British-born American mathematician, known for his contributions to applied probability theory.

Biography

Smith was born in London on November 12, 1926.
Smith received a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University, having gained First Class in the Mathematical Tripos Part 1 and Part 2. He then received an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge. His dissertation was entitled Stochastic Sequences of Events advised by Henry Daniels and D. R. Cox, with whom he published the book Queues and also published with in his early years. He became a professor of statistics at The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and he was an emeritus professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research.
Smith was a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a winner of the Adams Prize at the University of Cambridge, a Sir Winston Churchill overseas fellow and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship
Smith died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on March 6, 2023, at the age of 96.

The superimposition of several strictly periodic sequences of events, in Biometrika, 40, 1953. With Cox.
A direct proof of a fundamental theorem of renewal theory, in Skandinavisk Aktuartidsskrift, 36, 1953
On the superposition of renewal processes, in Biometrika, 41:91–99, 1954. With Cox.
A note on truncation and sufficient statistics in The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 28:247–252, 1957
On the distribution of Tribolium confusum in a container, in Biometrika, 44, 1957. With Cox.
, in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 20:243–302, 1958
On the elementary renewal theorem for non-identically distributed variables, in Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 14:673–699, 1964
Congestion Theory, Proceedings of the Symposium on Congestion Theory, The University of North Carolina Monograph Series in Probability and Statistics., 1965. With William E. Wilkinson.
Necessary conditions for almost sure extinction of a branching process with random environment, Annals of Mathematical Statistics,. 39:2136–2140, 1968
Branching processes in Markovian environments in Duke Mathematical Journal 38:749–763, 1971. With William E. Wilkinson
Harold Hotelling 1895–1973 in The Annals of Statistics, 6:1173–1183, 1978
On transient regenerative processes in Journal of Applied Probability, 23:52–70, 1986. With E. Murphree.