Archive for Louvain

lecturing in Collège

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2024 by xi'an

A few weeks ago I gave a seminar on ABC (and its asymptotics) in the beautiful amphitheatre Marguerite de Navarre (a writer, a thinker, and a protector of writers like Rabelais and of reformist catholics, as well as th sister of the Collège founder, François I) of Collège de France, as complement of the lecture of that week by Stéphane Mallat, who is teaching this year on Learning and random sampling. In this lecture, Stéphane introduced Metropolis-Hastings as one can guess from the blackboards above! The amphitheatre was quite full since master students from several Parisian universities are following the course, along the “general public” since the first principle of the courses delivered at Collège de France is that they are open to everyone, free of charge and without preliminary registration! (As a countermeasure to the monopoly of the university of Paris, following the earlier example of the 1518 trilingual college of Louvain). Here are the slides I partly covered in the lecture.

Peter Hall (1951-2016)

Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2016 by xi'an

I just heard that Peter Hall passed away yesterday in Melbourne. Very sad news from down under. Besides being a giant in the fields of statistics and probability, with an astounding publication record, Peter was also a wonderful man and so very much involved in running local, national and international societies. His contributions to the field and the profession are innumerable and his loss impacts the entire community. Peter was a regular visitor at Glasgow University in the 1990s and I crossed paths with  him a few times, appreciating his kindness as well as his highest dedication to research. In addition, he was a gifted photographer and I recall that the [now closed] wonderful guest-house where we used to stay at the top of Hillhead had a few pictures of his taken in the Highlands and framed on its walls. (If I remember well, there were also beautiful pictures of the Belgian countryside by him at CORE, in Louvain-la-Neuve.) I think the last time we met was in Melbourne, three years ago… Farewell, Peter, you certainly left an indelible print on a lot of us.

[Song Chen from Beijing University has created a memorial webpage for Peter Hall to express condolences and share memories.]

Leuven snapshot [#1]

Posted in pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , on April 7, 2014 by xi'an

Leuven1