Professor Richard Samworth wins Adams Prize for statistical analysis

Professor Richard Samworth, Fellow of St John’s College, has been awarded the Adams Prize 2016-17.

The Adams Prize, one of the University of Cambridge’s oldest and most prestigious prizes, has been awarded jointly to Professor Richard Samworth, Faculty of Mathematics, and Professor Graham Cormode.

Richard Samworth is a Professor of Statistics in the Statistical Laboratory, a sub-department of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, which is part of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Teaching Fellow at St John’s.

The topic for this year’s Adams Prize was ‘Statistical Analysis of Big Data’. Professor Raymond E. Goldstein FRS, Chairman of the Adams Prize Adjudicators, commented that Professor Samworth “has made ground-breaking contributions in the areas of nonparametric estimation under qualitative constraints, random projections in feature space, and high-dimensional statistics.”

The Adams Prize is awarded jointly each year by the Faculty of Mathematics and St John’s College to UK-based researchers under the age of 40 who are carrying out first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences. The prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John’s College, and is currently worth approximately £15,000. It commemorates Adams’ role in the discovery of the planet Neptune through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.

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