Event

The Lecture Series is named after the remarkable German-American statistician Hermann Otto Hartley (known as HOH). Born H.O. Hirschfeld, he completed his PhD in mathematics at the University of Berlin in 1934. Shortly thereafter, he who was of Jewish descent, emigrated to England where he also changed his name a few years later. He worked at Cambridge, Schofield, and University College London. He emigrated to the United States in 1953 to take a position at Iowa State College.
In 1963 he founded Texas A&M University's Institute of Statistics. He was the driving force behind its expansion during the next two decades. After his retirement from Texas A&M in 1977 he continued to work until his death in 1980 at which point he was a full professor at Duke University. Throughout his career, he helped to establish statistics as an important and autonomous scientific discipline.
His most influental research was in the area of survey sampling, but he also contributed to mathematical programming and optimization, the estimation of variance components and biometrics. He served as the 74th president of the American Statistical Association.
In this spirit, the Hermann Otto Hirschfeld Lectures at Humboldt-Universität are given since 2003 in memory of an excellent scientist and an advocate of quantitative methods.