Julian Besag

British statistician (1945–2010)

Julian Ernst Besag

Born	(1945-03-26)26 March 1945 Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK
Died	6 August 2010(2010-08-06) (aged 65) Bristol, UK
Alma mater	University of Birmingham
Known for	Spatial statistics, image analysis, Markov random fields & MCMC
Awards	Guy Medal (Silver, 1983) Fellow of the Royal Society (2004)
Scientific career
Fields	Statistician
Institutions	Universities of Oxford, Liverpool, Durham, Newcastle and Washington
Academic advisors	M. S. Bartlett

Julian Ernst Besag FRS (26 March 1945 – 6 August 2010) was a British statistician known chiefly for his work in spatial statistics (including its applications to epidemiology, image analysis and agricultural science), and Bayesian inference (including Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms).

Early life and education

Besag was born in Loughborough and was educated at Loughborough Grammar School. He began studying engineering at the University of Cambridge but moved to the University of Birmingham to study statistics, obtaining his BSc in 1968.

Career

He then spent a year as a research assistant to Maurice Bartlett at the University of Oxford before obtaining a lectureship at the University of Liverpool. Inspired by John Tukey, he visited Princeton for a year.

He moved to the University of Durham in 1975, where he became a professor in 1986. He was a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle during 1989–90 and, after a year at Newcastle University, returned to Seattle long-term. He officially retired in 2007 but remained an emeritus professor. At his death in 2010 he was also a visiting professor at the Universities of Bath and Bristol.

Besag was an ISI highly cited researcher; his 1986 paper "On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures" was the most cited paper by a UK mathematical scientist in the 1980s. The Royal Statistical Society awarded him its Guy Medal in Silver in 1983 for his contributions to spatial statistics, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004.

Notable contributions

Spatial statistics

For an array of random variables Y_ij, stochastic dependence was known to be important. Julian initially researched a model to for the correlation between Y_ij pairs as a function of the distance between the corresponding lattice point pairs. However, this proved to be difficult due to ambiguous conditions for self-consistency.

He therefore suggested using multivariate distributions for such a variable, taking inspiration from statistical physics and unpublished work by Peter Clifford and John Hammersley:

$P$

He published his findings to the Royal Statistical Society in March 1974.

Death

Besag died in Bristol, 2010 following a surgery.

Notable publications

Besag, J. (1974) "Spatial Interaction and the Statistical Analysis of Lattice Systems", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 36 (2), 192–236. JSTOR 2984812
Besag, J. (1975) "Statistical Analysis of Non-Lattice Data." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series D, 24(3), 179–195. JSTOR 2987782
Besag, J. (1977) "Comments on Ripley's paper." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 39(2), 193–195
Besag, J.E. (1986) "On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 48, 259–302. JSTOR 2345426
Besag, J.; York, J.; Mollié, A. (1991). "Bayesian image restoration, with two applications in spatial statistics". Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. 43 (1): 1–20. doi:10.1007/BF00116466. S2CID 13799826.

References

Profile: Julian Besag, FRS. IMS Bulletin Sept/Oct 2004; Vol. 33 No. 5, p13.
Prof Julian Besag at Debrett's People of Today
Julian Besag – Department of Statistics – University of Washington Archived 18 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine

Julian Besag at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
^ Diggle, Peter J.; Green, Peter J.; Silverman, Bernard W. (28 March 2018). "Julian Ernst Besag. 26 March 1945–6 August 2010". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 64: 27–50. arXiv:1711.10262. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2017.0039. ISSN 0080-4606.
Besag, Julian (1974). "Spatial Interaction and the Statistical Analysis of Lattice Systems". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B. 36 (2): 192–225. doi:10.1111/j.2517-6161.1974.tb00999.x. ISSN 2517-6161.

External links

v t e Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2004
Fellows	Samson Abramsky Spencer Barrett Julian Besag Tim Birkhead Martin Bobrow Donal Bradley Malcolm Brown Richard Catlow Graeme Clark Gordon Conway Lennox Cowie Anthony Cullis Partha Dasgupta Nick Day Caroline Dean Graham Dockray Richard M. Durbin David B. A. Epstein Gerard Evan Bland Finlay Norman Fleck Carlos Frenk Vernon C. Gibson Lynn Gladden Bryan Grenfell Stephen Edgar Halford Andrew D. Hamilton Edward Hinds David William Holden David Kemp Malcolm Longair Alan Martin John F. B. Mitchell William Motherwell David Preiss John A. Pyle Carol V. Robinson Nancy Rothwell David Henry Solomon Peter St George-Hyslop Chris Stringer David Tollervey Nicholas Wald Dale Brian Wigley
Foreign	K. Frank Austen Peter Goldreich Jane Lubchenco Elliot Meyerowitz Michele Parrinello F. Sherwood Rowland

Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2004

Fellows