ORIE Professor Sidney Resnick Honored as TUM Distinguished Affiliated Professor

The Technishe Universität München (TUM) awards the honor of "TUM Distinguished Affiliated Professor" to "exceptional personalities and researchers of international prominence, who have not only significantly shaped their own discipline, but have also inspired other areas within the scientific community," according to Wolfgang A. Herrmann, President of the Munich, Germany, university. 

Lee Teng Hui Professor of Engineering Sidney Resnick received this designation at an award ceremony in Munich on May 10, part of a two day workshop on "Extremes: Statistical Modeling and Applications," with speakers from several European universities and other research organizations.  Following the ceremony, Resnick spoke on ""Two Problems in Heavy Tailed Modeling."

Resnick is one of 32 researchers chosen by TUM over the years.  Among the 13 in his category, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, are three Nobel laureates.

Resnick, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1987 and served as ORIE Director from 1999 to 2004, works on problems in applied probability and statistics.  A recurrent theme in his work is the influence of the tails of probability distributions, especially those with "heavy tails,"  where occurences of large values, more frequently than in the standard normal distribution,  shock the system.  The analysis of such systems has become increasingly important in data networking and financial applications.  Resnick's workshop talk discussed problems in modelling phenomena exhibiting such extreme behavior.