Bernard Harris

An academically precocious youngster, Bernard Harris graduated at an early age from Townsend-Harris High School, and then entered City College of New York. During his college education, he was drafted into the army, assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, and sent to Germany towards the end of World War II. Upon completion of military service, he finished his bachelor’s degree in business administration at City College in 1946. He changed his academic focus to mathematics and statistics, earned a master’s degree from George Washington University in 1953, and in one year, completed his doctorate at Stanford University in 1958.

His contributions to risk analysis, reliability, probability, and statistical inferences with application to open DOD questions, such as the survivability of subterranean targets, was recognized in 1982 with the Wilks Award for Contributions to Statistical Methodologies in Army Research, Development and Testing. His work continued to address current problems in his later years, with recent work concerning mathematical methods in combating terrorism, and his 2010 paper entitled “Random Contamination of Semiconductor Materials.”

Bernard was the author of a book, *Theory of Probability*, and the editor of Spectral Analysis of Time series and Graph Theory and its Applications. He published hundreds of articles and reviews in professional journals over the course of his career. He was most proud of his work in random mappings, combinatorics, reliability and risk analysis.

Source: [Institute of Mathematical Statistics](https://imstat.org/2011/07/15/obituary-bernard-harris-1926-2011/)