Peter Gavin Hall

Peter Gavin Hall AO FAA FRS (20 November 1951 – 9 January 2016) was an Australian researcher in probability theory and mathematical statistics. The American Statistical Association described him as one of the most influential and prolific theoretical statisticians in the history of the field. The School of Mathematics and Statistics Building at The University of Melbourne was renamed the Peter Hall building in his honour on 9 December 2016.

Education

Hall attended Sydney Technical High School in Bexley, NSW during the years 1964-1969. He placed consistently high in examination results and in his final year, was among the top achievers in his form, and the winner of Old Boys' Union Mathematics prize.

Hall earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford in 1976 for research supervised by John Kingman.

Career and research

Hall was an author in probability and statistics. Mathscinet lists him with 606 publications as of January 2016. As of 2016 Google Scholar lists his h-index as 113. He made contributions to nonparametric statistics, in particular for curve estimation and resampling: the bootstrap method, smoothing, density estimation, and bandwidth selection. He worked on numerous applications across fields of economics, engineering, physical science and biological science. Hall also made contributions to surface roughness measurement using fractals. In probability theory he made many contributions to limit theory, spatial processes and stochastic geometry. His paper "Theoretical comparison of bootstrap confidence intervals" (Annals of Statistics, 1988) has been reprinted in the Breakthroughs in Statistics collection.

He was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, and also had a joint appointment at University of California Davis. He previously held a professorship at the Centre for Mathematics and its Applications at the Australian National University. He was an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. He is one of only three researchers based outside of North America to win the prestigious COPSS presidents' Award.

Honours and awards

His awards and honours included:

Published Books

• P. Hall; C.C. Heyde (1980): Martingale Limit Theory and its Application, Academic Press, New York. ISBN 0-12-319350-8
• P. Hall (1982): Rates of Convergence in the Central Limit Theorem, Pitman, London. ISBN 0-273-08565-4
• P. Hall (1988): Introduction to the Theory of Coverage Processes, Wiley, New York. ISBN 0-471-85702-5
• P. Hall (1992): The Bootstrap and Edgeworth Expansion, Springer, New York. ISBN 0-387-97720-1

Personal life

Peter Hall was born to radiophysics and radio astronomy pioneer Ruby Payne-Scott and telephone technician William Holman Hall. His younger sister is artistic photographer and sculptor, Fiona Margaret Hall. Hall was a keen photographer with a special interest in train photography. He enjoyed travel and was a regular visitor to many universities around the world. He died of leukaemia in Melbourne on 9 January 2016. He is survived by his wife, Jeannie.