Resnick Becomes a Chaired Professor

Sidney Resnick joined the Cornell faculty from Colorado State University as Full Professor in 1987 and served as Director of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering from 1999 to 2004.  Recently the Cornell Board of Trustees elected him the Lee Teng-Hui Professor in Engineering. 

Resnick joins Jack Muckstadt, David Ruppert,  and Michael Todd as chaired professors in ORIE.  Muckstadt is the Acheson-Laibe Professor, Todd the L.C. Welch Professor and Ruppert the Andrew Schultz Jr. Professor of Engineering.  Being named a chaired professor is the highest academic honor Cornell bestows. 

Resnick's research has been concentrated on developing probability models and exploring their properties.  In recent years he has investigated heavy tailed probability distributions and the various systems whose behavior is characterized by these distributions.  For such systems, extreme events are more likely to occur than is the case, for example, with normally distributed events. Resnick has developed fundamental theory and has examined the properties of heavy tailed distributions that occur in telecommunications data networks and in finance. 

A Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the International Statistical Institute, Resnick held the Lady Davis Fellowship at the Technion in Israel and a U. K. Science and Engineering Research Council Fellowship at Sussex University in England.  He has also held appointments at Colorado State University, Stanford University, the University of North Carolina, Columbia University, the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Mathematics Center, the Australian National University and CSIRO in Canberra,  Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Eurandom in Eindhoven, ETH Zurich,  the University of Bern,  Technical University Munich, Bell Laboratories, AT&T Labs Research, and Technical University, Munich.

Resnick is the author of two text books, A Probability Path and Adventures in Stochastic Processes, as well as two other books, most recently one originally called Heaviosity: Probabilistic and Statistical Modeling of Heavy Tail Phenomena but which was published as Heavy Tail Phenomena: Probabilistic and Statistical Modeling.    A reviewer characterized his style as "entertaining, elegant, reader-friendly and at the same time fully rigourous."  

The latest book's original title, which includes a quote from Woody Allen's Annie Hall, is an example of Resnick's dry writing style, as is this quote from a recent paper:  "Religious copularians have unshakable faith in the value of transforming a multivariate distribution to its copula.  For the skeptics who believe the Emperor has no clothes (Mikosh (2006)), perhaps use of the Pareto copula convinces some of them that the Emperor at least wears socks." 

Resnick's chair is named for Lee Teng-Hui, a native of Taiwan who was President of the Republic of China from 1988 to 2000.  Lee received a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Cornell in 1968.  Resnick's is one of two anonymously endowed chairs in Lee's honor.