Kots, Samuil Borisovich

Born in 1930 in Harbin, where his family fled from Ufa during the Civil War in 1919. His grandfather, Israel-Michel Movshevich Kots (1875-1958) ^{[2] [3]} was a watchmaker from Chawley from the Kovno province , from where he moved to Orenburg in 1883, then to Ufa and later opened his own watch brand “M. Kots ”and“ Ural shop ”of watch and jewelry at the corner of Beketovskaya and Bolshaya Uspenskaya streets ^[4] . In 1920, he opened the Geneva watch and jewelry store on the corner of Chinese and Yamskaya streets in Harbin (where the father of the future scientist Boris Izrailevich Kots also worked); after the death of his wife Sheina Khonovna ^[5] in 1958 he moved to his son in Hong Kong . After graduating from the University of Liège with an engineering degree in 1925, the father of the future scientist continued to work at the Harbin watch company M. Kots, his mother (a graduate of the chemical department of the same university) came from a Warsaw rabbinical dynasty ^[6] .

Until the age of twelve, he studied at the Jewish school of Harbin. After graduating from a Russian high school in Harbin in 1945, he studied at an English college for a year, then entered the Russian-speaking Harbin Institute of Technology , who graduated with a diploma in electrical engineering in 1949, and emigrated to Israel the same year ^[7] . I independently studied the textbooks of Fichtenholtz , Kurosh , Markushevich , Bronstein and Semendyaev in Russian . After serving in the army (1949-1951) he entered and graduated from the Mathematics Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1956, after which he worked for two years in the Israeli meteorological service. The first scientific publication (with Yitzhak Katznelson ) was published in 1957.

Since 1958 - in doctoral studies at Cornell University , where in 1960 he defended his thesis of a doctor of philosophy in mathematics under the direction of Jacob Wolfowitz . In 1960-1962 he worked at Bar-Ilan University , in 1962-1964 he was an assistant in the mathematical department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Since 1964 - Associate Professor and Research Fellow of the Mathematics Department of the University of Toronto , since 1967 - Professor of the Mathematics Department of Temple University . Since 1979 - professor at the College of Business and Management at the University of Maryland at College Park . From 1997 to the end of his life, he was a professor and researcher at the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at George Washington University , where he focused on operations research .

Major scientific papers in the field of distribution systems, multivariate analysis, substitution theory, quality control, information theory, applied statistics.

He was co-founder (with Norman L. Johnson ) and editor-in-chief of the thirteen-volume Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences ( John Wiley & Sons , 1982-1999). He is the author of the Compendium of Statistical Distributions in 4 volumes (with N. L. Johnson, 1969-1972 and 1993-1997), twelve monographs on mathematical statistics, three Russian-English dictionaries of scientific terminology, and many highly cited scientific papers. Translated into English the monograph by K. O. Japaridze “Parameter Estimation and Hypothesis Testing in Spectral Analysis” (1985), N. N. Krasovsky and A. I. Subbotin “Game-Theoretical Control Problems” (1988).

Fello Institute of Mathematical Statistics , American Statistical Association , Royal Statistical Society , elected member of the International Statistical Institute . Honorary Doctor of Harbin Polytechnic Institute (1988), University of Athens (1995) and Bowling Green University (1997). In 1998 he was awarded the medal "for scientific achievements throughout his career in the field of mathematical sciences" in honor of the centenary of the Washington Academy of Sciences ^[8] .

• The elder brother of his father - Moses (Minya) Izrailevich Kots (1899-1938), assistant of the Department of Hygiene of the Khabarovsk Medical Institute , was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1938; his grandson is journalist Igor Kots ^[9] , his great-grandson is journalist Alexander Kots ^[10] .
• Wife - Raise Kotz (nee Greenwald).
  • Son - Harold David Kotz (born 1966), lawyer, inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission (2007-2012) ^{[11] [12]} . Daughters - Tamar Kots and Pnina Levinson ^[13] .

• Compendium on Statistical Distributions. In 4 volumes. Wiley, 1969-1972, 1993-1997.
• Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences. In 13 volumes. Wiley, 1982-1999.
• Samuel Kotz . Russian-English Dictionary of Statistical Terms and Expressions and Russian Reader in Statistics. The University of North Carolina Press, 1964, 2011 .-- 134 pp.
• Samuel Kotz . Russian-English Dictionary and Reader in the Cybernetical Sciences. Academic Press, 1966. - 214 pp.
• Norman L. Johnson, Samuel Kotz . Continuous Univariate Distributions. Wiley, 1971, 1976, 1994, 2000 .-- 761 pp.
• Norman L. Johnson, Samuel Kotz . Continuous Univariate Distributions. Volume 2. Wiley, 1971, 1976, 1995. - 752 pp.
• Norman L. Johnson, Samuel Kotz . Univariate Discrete Distributions. Wiley, 1971, 1976, 1993, 1997 .-- 592 pp.
• Norman L. Johnson, Samuel Kotz . Distributions in Statistics: Continuous Multivariate Distributions. Wiley, 1972 .-- 333 pp.
• Samuel Kotz . Russian-English, English-Russian Glossary of Statistical Terms. International Statistical Institute, 1972.- 88 pp.
• Norman L. Johnson, Samuel Kotz . Urn Models and Their Application: An Approach to Modern Discrete Probability Theory. Wiley, 1977 .-- 416 pp.
• Janos Galambos, Samuel Kotz . Characterizations of Probability Distributions: A Unified Approach with an Emphasis on Exponential and Related Models. Springer, 1978.- 170 pp.
• Samuel Kotz . Educated Guessing: How to Cope in an Uncertain World. Marcel Dekker, 1983.- 224 pp.
• Norman L. Johnson, Samuel Kotz, Xi-Zhi Wu . Inspection Errors for Attributes in Quality Control. Chapman and Hall, 1991 .-- 216 pp.
• Samuel Kotz, Norman L. Johnson . Process Capability Indices. Chapman and Hall, 1993 .-- 224 pp.
• Samuel Kotz, Saralees Nadarajah . Extreme Value Distributions: Theory and Applications. Wiley, 2000 .-- 185 pp.
• Samuel Kotz, Tomasz Kozubowski, Krzystof Podgorski . The Laplace Distribution and Generalizations: A Revisit with Applications to Communications, Economics, Engineering, and Finance. Birkhäuser, 2001 .-- 349 pp.
• Samuel Kotz, Yan Lumelskii , Marianna Pensky . Stress-Strength Model and Its Generalizations: The Theory and Applications. Singapore - River Edge : World Scientific Publishing Company - Imperial College Press , 2003. - 272 pp ^[14] .
• Christian Kleiber, Samuel Kotz . Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences. Wiley, 2003 .-- 352 pp.
• Samuel Kotz, Saralees Nadarajah . Multivariate T-Distributions and Their Applications. Cambridge University Press, 2004 .-- 284 pp.
• Samuel Kotz, Johan Rene van Dorp . Beyond Beta: Other Continuous Families Of Distributions With Bounded Support And Applications. World Scientific Publishing, 2004 .-- 308 pp.
• Samuel Kotz, Wen-Lea Pearn . Encyclopedia And Handbook of Process Capability Indices: A Comprehensive Exposition of Quality Control Measures. World Scientific Publishing Company, 2006. - 392 pp.