In Memoriam : Jean-Paul Rasson

In memoriam : Prof. Jean-Paul Rasson (1949-2013), University of Namur, Belgium

Jean-Paul Rasson is born on May 9th, 1949 in Avelgem (Belgium). He has
been married and has one daughter and three grand children.

He get his PhD Thesis in 1977, after a research period in Cambridge
under the supervision of Prof. D.G. Kendall and in Paris with Prof. K.
Kriekeberg. His thesis was about convexity, Poisson process and spatial
statistic. He published his first important paper with D.B. Ripley,
"Finding the edge of a Poisson forest", in the Journal of Applied
Probability (1977).

He supervised 11 PhD students and more than 75 master students. He
wrote nearly 150 papers, like "A new Sobolev Test for uniformity on the
Circle", with M.Hermans, published in Biometrika (1985), "Multivariate
discriminant analysis and maximum penalized likelihood density
estimation", with V. Granville, published in Journal Royal Statist.
Soc. (1995) or many contributions to data analysis and classification
published, like the proceedings of the 2000 IFCS Namur meeting : "Data
Analysis, Classification and Related Methods". He was a usual speaker in
IFCS, SFC, GfKl, Cladag, Clad, SFdS, CompStat, Kesda, SODAS, NTTS,
IGARSS, ERIM, ISI meetings. He collaborated on several European projects
like Rainbow (Statistics for public administrations) and Sodas or Asso
(Symbolic Data) as well as Belgian projects like "Remote sensing data
analysis for deforestation in Philippines" or "Prediction of the failure
of Walloon private companies".

He was member of the board of the Belgian Statistical Society from 1993
till 1997, fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, Vice-president and
President of the Société Francophone de Classification (SFC) from 1995
till 1998, and Vice-president and President of the International
Federation of Classification Societies in 2000 and 2001.

His contributions were in the field of stochastic geometry, non convex
spatial statistics, classification, discriminant analysis, symbolic data
analysis, non homogeneous Poisson process estimation, remote sensing
detection analysis, kernel density estimation, wavelet applications to
signal processing and many more. He was keen to collaborate with as
many researchers as possible. He was always, and at any time, doing
research, even in a bar on a beer mate. Many of these scientific
collaborations yield to a true friendship.

He liked to teach probability and statistics to students, to give them
the taste of research and innovation. After a long period of illness,
he passed away on January 9th, 2013.

For more memories, visit
http://www.dansnospensees.be/fr/avis-de-deces/rouwregister/09-01-2013/jean-paul-rasson

Marcel Rémon
Namur University