Earlier today, I was informed by several of our mutual friends that my long-time friend Bill Strawderman had sadly passed away yesterday, after fighting a cancer for the past months. I remember quite clearly meeting Bill in the Fall of 1988 in front of White Hall, which hosted the Cornell maths department at the time, as he was visiting George Casella from Rutgers where he spent most of his career. I was most eager to meet him as I had worked on several of his landmark papers during my PhD on shrinkage estimation, as well as a bit impressed. But his kindness, modesty, and congenial personality quickly put me at ease and we spent the rest of his visit discussing shrinkage but also literature and music. Especially Dickens! After that we met and collaborated quite regularly, to the point he started visiting France upon my return, at Paris 6 (Pierre & Marie Curie) University first, and then in Rouen, where he became a adjunct professor and launched a life-long collaboration and friendship with Dominique Fourdrinier. As my interest in shrinkage estimation dwindled along the years, we did not keep collaborating for the past two decades, but we remained in touch and I was very happy to participate in his 80th anniversary celebration in Rutgers two years ago. His contributions to the field are notable and several papers of his were part of the Bayesian classics I was giving my graduate class a few years ago. From the fabulous minimaxity paper of 1984, along with George Casella, to admissible estimators dominating the positive-part James-Stein estimator, to sufficient conditions of minimaxity for proper Bayes estimators, to decision theoretic properties of Bayesian credible interval estimators, to loss estimation, not to mention his more applied side… Besides his fabulous sense of humour, which made many evenings with him memorable, I will also cherish the memory of a bon vivant who liked good food and good wines, incl. the Calvados apple brandy I would bring him at each of my visits.
