Thomas G. Kurtz

He was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2020 Class, for "research in probability and its applications, especially for contributions to the study of Markov processes".

Kurtz is a former president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2005–2006) and a former editor of the Annals of Probability (2000–2002). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was chosen to give the Wald Memorial Lectures in 2014 at the IMS Annual Meeting in Sydney, Australia.

Kurtz obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1967 under the supervision of James L. McGregor. As an undergraduate student he attended University of Missouri where he graduated in 1963 with a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics. Kurtz is also an alumnus of La Plata High School in La Plata, Missouri.

After completing his Ph.D. in 1967, Kurtz joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he remained for his entire career. He received a joint appointment in the Statistics department in 1985. In 1996, he was awarded the WARF-University Houses Professorship, which he chose to identify as the Paul Lévy Professorship to honor one of the founders of modern probability theory. At UW Madison, Kurtz served as the Mathematics Department Chair from 1985 to 1988 and as the Director of the Center for Mathematical Sciences from 1990 to 1996. He retired from active teaching in 2008 but he continues to work as an emeritus professor. During his academic career Kurtz has supervised twenty-nine Ph.D. students and lectured extensively at UW Madison and elsewhere. For almost a decade, he organized a Summer Internship Program in Madison, which helped in grooming the next generation of probabilists.

Thomas G. Kurtz (born 14 July 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri, United States) is an American emeritus professor of Mathematics and Statistics at University of Wisconsin-Madison known for his research contributions to many areas of probability theory and stochastic processes. In particular, Kurtz’s research focuses on convergence, approximation and representation of several important classes of Markov processes. His findings appear in scientific disciplines such as systems biology, population genetics, telecommunications networks and mathematical finance.