Larry Brown

Larry Brown has passed away.  Larry was a giant of modern statistics and a towering presence at Penn.  Simultaneously, everyone who knew him liked him, immensely. He will be missed dearly, both professionally and personally.

I received the obituary below from Penn's Statistics Department.

Lawrence David Brown Lawrence D. Brown died peacefully at 6:30 a.m. on Feb. 21, 2018, at the age of 77. Larry preserved his unfailing fortitude and good humor to his last day. Larry was born on Dec. 16, 1940, in Los Angeles, California. His parents moved to Alexandria, VA, during World War II, then returned to California. His father, Louis Brown, was a successful tax lawyer and later a professor of law at the University of Southern California, where he worked tirelessly on behalf of client services and conflict prevention, for which he coined the phrase preventive law. His mother, Hermione Kopp Brown, studied law in Virginia and then in Los Angeles and became one of the leading women lawyers in Los Angeles in the field of entertainment law, with emphasis on estate planning. Larry inherited their dedication for service, their mental acuity and resourcefulness, and their selfless good spirits. Larry graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1957 and from the California Institute of Technology in 1961 and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University three years later. Initially hired at the University of California, Berkeley, he then taught in the mathematics department at Cornell University from 1966-72 and 1978-94 and in the statistics department at Rutgers University from 1972-78; he moved to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and taught his last course there as the Miers Busch Professor of Statistics in the fall of 2017. One of the leading statisticians of his generation, he was the recipient of many honors, including devoted service as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the presidency of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an honorary doctorate from Purdue University. He was much loved by his colleagues and his students, many of whom hold leading positions in the United States and abroad. His passion for his work was matched by his devotion to his family. His wife Linda Zhao survives him, as do their sons Frank and Louie, their daughter Yiwen Zhao, his daughters from his first marriage, Yona Alpers and Sarah Ackman, his brothers Marshall and Harold and their wives Jane and Eileen, and 19 grandchildren.