"Gheorghe Mihoc - Caius Iacob" Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Applied Mathematics

Department of Mathematical Statistics


About us:

"The Centre for Mathematical Statistics (the Centre, for short, in what follows) was founded on 1st April 1964 as a research institute of the Romanian Academy. Its basic nucleus was the probability division of the Institute of Mathematics, which had been founded in 1949 as a unit of the same learned society. The promoter of this development was Professor Gheorghe Mihoc (1906-1981), who became the Centre�s first director, and after whom the Centre has been named since 1997. Mihoc�s motivation was a visionary understanding of the part that probability and statistics would play in the not very distant future, rather than the considerable expansion of these fields at the time. The appearance of the Centre also constituted a revival, at a different level, of the Institute of Statistics, Actuarial Science and Computation of Bucharest University, which developed in 1941 from the School of Statistics founded in 1931 by Professor Octav Onicescu (1892-1983). This institute, dismantled in 1947, was one of the first centres of postgraduate studies in statistics in the world.

The Centre was intended to carry out both basic research and applications, the latter consisting mainly of genuine applied mathematics, which is to be understood as setting up realistic mathematical models. This basic idea was implemented by bringing together mathematicians with strong background in probability, statistics, and operations research and economists, physicians, biologists, and engineers. As time went on, the spectrum of nonmathematical specialities narrowed, but the basic idea has never vanished. This is all the more remarkable as the Centre passed through several successive organizational changes: with the Ministry of Education (1974-1975), with the National Institute of Metrology (1976-1989), with the Romanian Academy again from 1990 to date.

Special mention should be made of the Centre's contribution to the scientific co-operation between Romanian and foreign scientists.

First, the Centre was entrusted with the organization of the Anglo-Romanian Conference on Mathematics in the Archaeological and Historical Sciences in Mamaia in 1970, under the auspices of both the Royal Society of London and the Romanian Academy, and of the Eighth International Biometric Conference in Constanta in 1974. The Centre has also organized the Brasov conferences on probability theory in 1968, 1971, 1974, 1979 and 1982. The founders of these conferences were professors Onicescu and Mihoc. Starting from a small national colloquium in 1955 and continuing with a larger international one in 1962, the Brasov conferences found in the Centre a most appropriate planner and organizer; they were at the time a notable event in the calendar of international periodic scientific conferences.

Second, on behalf of the Romanian part, the Centre has been carrying the responsibility for specific topics included in the co-operation agreements between the Romanian Academy and other Academies of Sciences or national research bodies.

In spite of the different organizational clothes, the research work (both theoretic and applied), the educational work (ranging from training engineers in statistical quality control to supervising Ph.D. students in probability, statistics, operations research, and stochastic processes) as well as the international co-operation went on without interruption.

The Centre has been ruled by Professor Doctor Marius Iosifescu since 1976. "



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