Festschrift for William E. Strawderman

Éric Marchand just sent me the news that the Festschrift volume he edited jointly with Dominique Fourdrinier and Andrew Rukhin in honour of our dear friend Bill Strawderman has now appeared on ProjectEuclid. It is freely accessible, thanks to this great IMS policy of making everything available on-line. As my research focus drifted away from shrinkage estimation and decision theory, I am sorry I could not contribute to the volume… (I “met” Bill through my readings during my PhD thesis and “in the flesh” when visiting Cornell two years later. He has produced some of the most elegant results in the area of Stein estimation, incl. the one that no proper Bayes estimator can be minimax in dimension four or less, and if a particular shrinkage estimator was to be “Hall-of-Fame-d”, it would be his! Bill visited us in Rouen (Dominique and I) many times and even learned French in order to teach there. I also happened to have the most hilarious moment of my life [so far!] with him and George Casella on an Ithaca country road, late on a summer night, but I cannot alas disclose the details!!!)