Lucien Le Cam

Lucien Marie Le Cam, born on 18 November 1924 at Croze in the Creuse region of France and dying on 25 April 2000, was a mathematician and statistician. His parents were farmers who could not pay for higher education, and after his father died when he was thirteen he studied at a lycee that taught mathematics, then at the University of Paris, graduating in 1945 with a licence in science. He worked for five years at a hydroelectric utility while attending a weekly statistics seminar in Paris, and in 1950 was invited to Berkeley as an instructor. He stayed at the University of California, Berkeley, took his doctorate there in 1952 under Jerzy Neyman, and kept working there beyond his retirement in 1991 until his death. From 1950 to 1990 he was the leading figure in the development of abstract asymptotic theory in mathematical statistics. He is best known for local asymptotic normality and contiguity and for a metric theory of statistical experiments set out in his 1986 book Asymptotic Methods in Statistical Decision Theory. He introduced the deficiency to compare statistical models, and the Le Cam distance and Le Cam's theorem bear his name.