It is with sadness that we inform you of the passing of our colleague and friend Hervé Morin, who died in Québec City on October 16, 2025, as a result of Parkinson’s disease. Hervé was a professor of statistics at Université Laval for nearly 34 years, from September 1969 until his retirement in July 2003.

Hervé was born on July 28, 1944, in Levallois-Perret, a suburb of Paris. After earning his high school diploma with a mathematics major in January 1962, he began his higher education in Paris, culminating in October 1965, when he successfully passed the first-year final examination. In June 1967, he was awarded a postgraduate certificate in automatic calculation and, in October 1967, a certificate of aptitude for the use of statistical methods.

Following a chance encounter with Indo-Canadian statistician T. V. Narayana (1930–1987), who was visiting Paris where he had studied in the 1950s, Hervé accepted his invitation to embark on an adventure and pursue graduate studies at the University of Alberta. He arrived in Edmonton in November 1967 and completed a thesis on “Some Uses of APL in the Theory of Tournaments” in May 1970. It was also in Edmonton that he met his future wife, Claire Poirier, a teacher from Québec who was taking advantage of a Canada-wide exchange program launched to mark the centennial of Confederation. Hervé then decided to settle permanently in Canada.

In September 1969, Hervé was hired by Université Laval as a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics while concurrently completing his 16-month French military service. At that time, the School of Actuarial Science was still part of the department and offered very popular courses. Eager to join this group, Hervé completed four Society of Actuaries exams between 1973 and 1975. He was appointed assistant professor in June 1976 and advanced to associate professor in June 1980. During this period, Hervé and Claire lived on Québec’s south shore and had a daughter, Isabelle.

The year 1984 marked the founding of the Statistical Consulting Service (SCS) in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Hervé was the first to get involved, alongside Louis-Paul Rivest. Over the years, he supervised the final projects of many students enrolled in the Honours Bachelor’s Program in statistics. During this period, he also wrote a book in French on sampling theory, published by Presses de l’Université Laval in 1993. That same year, he became a full professor. He began transitioning into retirement in the fall of 2002.

Within the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC), Hervé first made a name for himself as the person in charge of local arrangements for the annual meeting held at Université Laval in 1987. From June 1990 to May 2000, he also served as coordinator of the French-language side of the SSC newsletter Liaison. His wife, Claire, also lent a hand with translations, starting with vol. 7, no. 4 (August 1993). In addition, Hervé oversaw the local arrangements for the ASU 28th Annual Conference, which drew more than 500 participants to Québec City in 1996. For this event, he chartered a flight from Paris to Québec City and organized the banquet in the grand ballroom of the Château Frontenac.

Long before his retirement—and continuing throughout it—Hervé developed an interest in history and genealogy while travelling the world with his wife. In particular, he compiled records of baptisms and burials in Saint-Nicolas in the 19th century, as well as a register of 3,000 marriages in Saint-Nicolas since 1694. These voluminous documents were published by the Historical Society of Saint-Nicolas and Bernières. He also coauthored with Benoît Lagueux the book Généalogie des familles souches de Saint-Nicolas, published by the same society in 2009.

Known for his good nature and sharp sense of humour, Hervé was deeply devoted to his family and community, notably serving as a Scout leader for many years in Charny. He is survived by his wife Claire, his daughter Isabelle Morin (Mathieu Bélanger), his granddaughter Anouk Lefebvre (Vincent Carbonneau), his great-grandson Louis, his late brother Gilles Morin (late Françoise Le Marec), his nephew François, and his niece Anne.

He will be greatly missed by us and by many of his former colleagues in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Université Laval.

C. Genest, McGill University and L.-P. Rivest, Université Laval