Page 482 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS355 Georg Lindgren
important concrete engineering problems. His two papers from 1944 and
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1945 on “Mathematical analysis of random noise” delivered that contact.
Many engineering communities quickly applied the stochastic approach to
previously deterministic fields, and control, mechanical, and ocean
engineering formulated their own versions, based on Rice’s treaties. One
spectacular shift in paradigm took place in ocean engineering, which built
advanced stochastic models for the ocean surface already in the early fifties,
negating the quote by Lord Rayleigh: “The basic law of the seaway is the
apparent lack of any law”. Central in many engineering studies were quantities
like maximum and local maxima of random processes, number of level
crossings and the distance between them. Rice’s formula for the expected
number of level crossings was used extensively.
The statistics community was slow to appreciate the many challenges that
lay open in Rice’s two articles, but around 1960 theoretical studies on level
crossings and extremes started to appear in core statistical journals and
conference proceedings. The book “Stationary and related stochastic
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processes, by Harald Cramer and Ross Leadbetter (1967), set the style for
much of theoretical research. It also gave a firm basis for the coming
development of statistical extreme value theory and its applications.

2. The person and his career
Steve O. Rice was born on November 29, 1907, in Shedds, Oregon, USA, as
the only child of Stephen Rice, a buttermaker, and Selma R. Bergren. Steve

entered Oregon State University, Corvallis, and received a B.S. degree in
electrical engineering in 1929. After a year of graduate studies in physics at
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, he joined Bell Telephone
Laboratories in New York, 1930. With Bell he got freedom to do own research
on the mathematical background of communication systems, but he also
earned a position as a very knowledgeable consultant for different
communication technology groups. During many decades Bell Labs was a hot-
bed for the development of communication theory and technology, to
mention just two names with statistics interests besides Steve Rice: Claude
Shannon with Information theory, and David Slepian with “Slepian’s
comparison lemma” and Coding theory. When Rice retired in 1972 he was
“Head, Communication Theory Department”, and located in Murray Hill, New
Jersey.
Steve Rice’s deep knowledge in mathematics and stochastic processes was
an invaluable asset, not the least since he understood how to combine the

 Some details in this section are extracted from David Slepian’s “Memorial Tributes”, 1991.
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 Selma Bergren’s father was born in Sweden and her mother had a typical Swedish name,
while born in USA
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