The Energy of Data and Distance Correlation

Gabor J. Szekely graduated from Eoetvoes Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary (ELTE) with MS in 1970, and Ph. D. in 1971. He joined the Department of Probability Theory of ELTE in 1970. In 1989 he became the funding chair of the Department of Stochastics of the Budapest Institute of Technology (Technical University of Budapest). In 1995 Szekely moved to the US. Before that, in 1990-91 he was the first distinguished Lukacs Professor at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Szekely had several visiting positions, e.g., at the University of Amsterdam in 1976 and at Yale University in 1989. Between 1985 and 1995 he was the first Hungarian director of Budapest Semesters in Mathematics. Between 2006 and 2022, until his retirement, he was program director of statistics of the National Science Foundation (USA). Szekely has almost 250 publications, including six books in several languages. In 1988 he received the Rollo Davidson Prize from Cambridge University, jointly with Imre Z. Ruzsa for their work on algebraic probability theory. In 2010 Szekely became an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics for his seminal work on physics concepts in statistics like energy statistics and distance correlation. Szekely was invited speaker at several Joint Statistics Meetings and also organizer of invited sessions on energy statistics and distance correlation. Szekely has two children, Szilvia and Tamas, and six grandchildren: Elisa, Anna, Michael and Lea, Eszter, Avi who live in Brussels, Belgium and Basel, Switzerland. Szekely and his wife, Judit, live in McLean, Virginia and Budapest, Hungary.




Maria L. Rizzo

is Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where she teaches statistics, actuarial science, computational statistics, statistical programming and data science. Prior to joining the faculty at BGSU in 2006, she was a faculty member of the Department of Mathematics at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Her main research area is energy statistics and distance correlation. She is the software developer and maintainer of the energy package for R, and author of textbooks on statistical computing: "Statistical Computing with R" 1st and 2nd editions, "R by Example" (2nd edition in progress) with Jim Albert, and a forthcoming textbook on data science. Dr. Rizzo has eight PhD students and one current student, almost all with dissertations on energy statistics. Outside of work she enjoys spending time with her family including her husband, daughters, grandchildren and a large extended family.