Walter L. Smith

Walter Laws Smith is an American mathematician, known for his contributions to applied probability theory.

Smith received his B.Sc. in mathematics (1947) from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He then moved to England to earn an M.Sc. (1951) and Ph.D. (1953) from University of Cambridge. His dissertation was entitled Stochastic Sequences of Events advised by Henry Daniels and D. R. Cox, with whom he published the book Queues (1961) and also published with in his early years. ^[1] He worked at Chapel Hill (1954-56 and 1958-), where he is now an emeritus in the department of statistics and operations research.^[2] He is fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, fellow of the American Statistical Association (1966), winner of the Adams Prize at the University of Cambridge (1960), Sir Winston Churchill overseas fellow and receiver of a Guggenheim Fellowship (see List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1974)

[edit] Publications

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(1-2):91-99, 1954. With Cox.
A note on truncation and sufficient statistics in The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 28(1):247-252, 1957
On the distribution of Tribolium confusum in a container, in Biometrika, 44(?), 1957. With Cox.
Renewal theory and its ramafications, in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 20(2):243-302, 1958
On the elementary renewal theorem for non-identically distributed variables, in Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 14(2):673-699, 1964
Congestion Theory, Proceedings of the Symposium on Congestion Theory, The University of North Carolina Monograph Series in Probabiliy and Statistics., 1965. With William E. Wilkinson (editors).
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(4):749-763, 1971. With William E. Wilkinson
Harold Hotelling 1895-1973 in The Annals of Statistics, 6(6):1173-1183, 1978
On transient regenerative processes in Journal of Applied Probability, 23(?):52-70, 1986. With E. Murphree.