The winner of the 2002 Robillard Prize was announced at the annual meeting of the SSC at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The winner was Jonathan Taylor for the thesis “Euler characteristics for Gaussian fields on manifolds”. The thesis was written at McGill University under the direction of Professor Keith Worsley of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and Professor Robert Adler of the Technion, Israel. The prize consists of a certificate, a cheque for $400, a one-year subscription to the Canadian Journal of Statistics and an invitation to submit a paper based on the thesis to that journal. Jonathan delivered an invited lecture based on the thesis at the meeting.

Jonathan completed all of his university education at McGill. Since graduating he has been employed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, Stanford University.

Jonathan’s thesis is concerned with studying the distribution of the maximum of a random field defined on a manifold. The distribution of this quantity is important in brain imaging where neuroscientists need to be able decide when a portion of the brain has been activated in response to some stimulus. The manifold in this case is the surface of the brain and the random field is some measure of activation like blood flow. While the distribution of this quantity had been solved for Euclidean spaces, Jonathan extended the results to arbitrary manifolds and obtained a number of key simplifications of earlier work. His mathematical results are currently being implemented in practical applications of brain imaging. Overall the thesis represents an impressive body of mathematical work with immediate application to a problem of great practical significance.

The prize winner was selected by a committee consisting of Professors Belkacem Abdous (Université Laval), Hugh Chipman (University of Waterloo), Michael Evans (University of Toronto) and Tim Ramsay (University of Ottawa). This year there were 7 theses submitted. The committee was impressed by the high quality of the submissions on a wide diversity of topics.

Michael Evans, University of Toronto, Chair of the Pierre Robillard Award Committee