S. James Press
Distinguished Professor of Statistics, Emeritus
Jim was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 4, 1931. Though a New Yorker by birth, he was a Californian in spirit, and in 1951 he and his beloved new wife, Grace, left New York for California. On the West Coast, they started a family and Jim embarked on a successful career, first in the aerospace industry and then in statistics.
In Los Angeles, Jim worked for Northrup and then Douglas Aircraft, but his insatiable desire to learn led him back to school and a change in careers after 10 years. He enrolled in night school at the University of Southern California, earning a Master’s degree in Mathematics. He then went on to the Ph.D. program in statistics at Stanford University under the direction of Dr. Ingram Olkin, graduating in 1964.
Jim’s first academic job was in the business school of the University of Chicago, where he taught until 1974. He then moved with Grace and their growing family – now three young children – to the University of British Columbia, where he could escape Chicago’s brutal winters and strike out on his own intellectually.
After four years in Canada, Jim was offered the opportunity to return to his beloved and warm Southern California to be Chair of the Statistics Department at UC Riverside. At UCR, he worked with his colleagues to shape the department and happily spent the rest of his career at UCR until his retirement in 2005 at the rank of Distinguished Professor.
The field of statistics lost one of its greats in the area of Bayesian multivariate analysis with Jim’s passing. His fundamental research contributions were in the areas of multivariate analysis, Bayesian analysis, cognitive aspects of survey methodology, and their applications across a range of disciplines. His early seminal research contributions include the Nerlove-Press models (1973, 1976), multivariate stable distributions (1972) and the t-ratio distribution (1969). His three statistics books are classics, and two of them are still available in their second editions: Applied Multivariate Analysis (1972, 1982, 2005), Bayesian Statistics: Principles, Models and Applications (1st ed. 1989) and Subjective and Objective Bayesian Statistics (2nd ed. 2002). He also co-authored with Judith M. Tanur the book The Subjectivity of Scientists and the Bayesian Approach (2001, 2016). From 1997-1998, he was an NSF/ASA Fellow at the Census Bureau.
Jim was an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. Jim spearheaded and co-founded with Arnold Zellner the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association .
In addition to statistics and his family, Jim’s great love was travel. The stories of his explorations with Grace through the Amazon jungle, all across Africa, and throughout Asia are now family lore.
Jim loved Riverside – the desert foliage, the orange groves, and the enveloping heat – as well as the university that was his home for 27 years. He is survived by Grace, their three children, Julie, Jamie and Daryl, and six grandchildren.
From The Membership Magazine of the American Statistical Association (written by Julie Press and Subir Ghosh), with editing by Dallas Rabenstein.
