Obituary

Lionel Weiss, professor emeritus in the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (ORIE), died suddenly May 23. He was 76.

"His death is a huge loss and comes as a shock because Lionel always seemed to have twice as much energy and vitality as anyone else," said Sidney Resnick, professor and director of ORIE.

Weiss grew up in New York City and received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Columbia University. While teaching at the University of Virginia, he spent the 1952-53 academic year as a Cornell visiting professor and four years later returned as a permanent faculty member. Weiss' arrival came during a period when Cornell statistics took a leap forward in prominence and influence with the hiring of four faculty members from Columbia University: Weiss, Bob Bechhofer, Jack Kiefer and Jack Wolfowitz. Kiefer, Bechhofer and Weiss had all studied under Wolfowitz.

Kiefer and Wolfowitz joined the math faculty. Weiss and Bechhofer both joined industrial engineering. They were brought to what became ORIE as key components of a vision to shape industrial engineering into a broader discipline, more sophisticated mathematically and better suited to the rapidly evolving needs of industry for decision-making tools.

Weiss was prolific and profound in his research contributions. He wrote more than 100 papers and published the text Statistical Decision Theory in 1961, making that subject accessible to both students and practitioners. His work with Wolfowitz on maximum probability estimators was both ingenious and important in overcoming deficiencies in the maximum likelihood theory introduced by Fisher. He did substantial work on asymptotic properties of order statistics, which produced "Weiss-type" point estimators, and on goodness-of-fit tests, where the "Weiss test" for independence of variables uses order statistics to overcome difficulties in how variables are grouped in a chi-squared goodness-of-fit test.

Weiss served as ORIE's associate director for undergraduate studies from 1986 to 1995. He was a dedicated and extremely effective teacher and was the winner of multiple teaching awards. He always was anxious to be of service right up to the time that he assumed the title professor emeritus in 1994, and he continued to serve as ORIE associate director on a special appointment during the 1994-95 academic year.

Weiss was certainly an intellectual leader of the statistics group in ORIE, but the most colorful Weiss anecdotes center around his high-octane teaching style, which combined great enthusiasm, clarity and expenditure of energy, say colleagues and former students.

"As a colleague in a technically oriented discipline at a high-pressure university, Lionel brought a special blend of devotion, kindness, charm, grace, common sense and broad scholarship to our school and to Cornell," Resnick said.

Weiss is survived by his wife, Rhoda, and three sons, Bob, Paul and David.

A memorial service is being planned with the family for Aug. 27. For further details, contact ORIE by phone at 255-4856, e-mail: moore@orie.cornell.edu or at the web site www.orie.cornell.edu.