Past and upcoming lectures
We'll be announcing the 2026 public lecture schedule soon, but if you're interested in getting involved – either as an attendee or a speaker – please get in touch with us on ms-outreach@unimelb.edu.au.
Peter Hall (1951–2016)
Peter Gavin Hall was born on 20 November in Sydney in 1951. He completed a BSc at the University of Sydney, a MSc at the Australian National University and a PhD at the University of Oxford. He was a Professor at the University of Melbourne since 2006 and held a fractional appointment at the University of California, Davis since 2005.
Peter had a massive impact on statisticians, both junior and senior, all over the world. His work was deep and creative. He wrote more than 600 research papers, most of which appeared in the top statistics or probability journals. He made extraordinary and enormously influential contributions to many areas of statistics, including: the bootstrap and Edgeworth expansions, rates of convergence in central limit theorems, deconvolution and inverse problems, spatial statistics problems, functional data analysis, smoothing methods, fractals, classification and clustering, and signal detection, extreme-value statistics, martingale theory and ranking techniques.
The diversity of topics he studied originated from his passion for science. He was fascinated by all sorts of problems, ranging from the most applied biological question to the most theoretical puzzle in number theory. Faced with a new challenge, he got insights by first exploring its fundamental theoretical properties. This is how he managed to unravel the most surprising characteristics of problems and suggest very innovative statistical methods. His constant search for insight and sheer tenacity as a researcher have led him to develop some of the most influential theory in modern statistics.
Peter received the most prestigious awards available to a statistician, including Fellowships of the Royal Society of London and of the Australian Academies of Science and Social Sciences, the election to foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and to Officer of the Order of Australia.
Peter was also strongly committed to his profession more generally, both in Australia and internationally. Among many other things, he served as President of the IMS, of the Bernoulli Society, and of the Australian Mathematical Society, and as Vice-President of the Australian Academy of Science; he served on innumerable committees and advisory boards and was editor and associate editor of many journals.
Outside academia, Peter had two great passions: steam trains and photography. He also had a passion for animals and was particularly fond of cats. After a prolonged period of illness, Peter passed away on 9 January 2016 in the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
This biography has been adapted from an article written by Aurore Delaigle and Raymond Carroll that was published in the IMS Bulletin Volume 45, Issue 3, 2016.