FONTPLAY "HALL OF FAME" SPECIAL AWARD
DR˛. LUC DEVROYE
“I've often heard it said that one measure to judge the vitality and
quality of life of a university or a locality is its library, particularly by
its available reference library in general and reference librarians in
particular. If that is indeed the case then the typographical community
is doing very well indeed thanks to the wonderful work of Luc Devroye.
It did not take me long, after first discovering it many years ago, to
realize that venturing anywhere else on the Web for information re-
garding anything to do with typography was absolutely pointless.
Search engines, commercial and free font sites, friends recommend-
ations etc....nothing has ever turned up via any other source that
isn't somehow documented and reviewed by Luc.
It has been such a time saver to read his expert abstracts and distilling
of the information offered by other sites. His site has not tried to push
any particular viewpoint down the visitors' throat, rather it has encour-
aged and enabled all to explore and learn about a subject so rich in history.
In this age on information overload, where conflicting statements on the
Web are presented as the "gospel truth" by a variety of site authors, it
is comforting to know that there is always one refuge you can go to where
there is no agenda other than the love of type. In addition, one could never
find a site better maintained; in all my many hundreds (thousands??? <g>)
of trips to it I can never recall when it has not been updated within the
previous 24 hours. That, to me, is dedication supreme.
Does Luc warrant inclusion in the "Hall Of Fame" pages?? They would be
the "Hall Of Shame" pages if he were left out. To Dr. Devroye I can only
say thank you, thank You.” - Mark Johansson
~~~~~~•~~~~~~
“Thanks to Luc I learned how to use mathematics as a tool to
create beautiful characters and fonts with. Design based on
numbers. A la bonheur, monsieur le professeur!”
-
Manfred Klein
~~~~~~•~~~~~~
to the University of Leuven (Belgium). Got married to Bea. Studied
for two years at Osaka University (Japan). Obtained a Ph.D. degree
from the University of Texas in 1976 under the supervision of Terry
Wagner, with a thesis entitled Nonparametric Discrimination and
Density Estimation. Joined the School of Computer Science at
McGill University in 1977 as a young snotnose. Currently Prof. of
Computer Science and associate member of the Department of
Mathematics and Statistics at McGill. Never had another job.
Thanks to a wonderful bunch of colleagues, still hanging in there.
~~~~~~•~~~~~~
What he fails to mention is that he is apparently world renown in
his field (statistics), and was just honored in Belgium's Institute
of Statistics: In 2002 the Institute of Statistics will celebrate
its tenth anniversary. A “Doctor Honoris Causa” degree will be
offered to Luc Devroye on May 21 in the afternoon.
And he is the widely acclaimed author of "The series method
in random variate generation and its application to the Kolmogorov-
Smirnov distribution", and who can forget “The uniform convergence
of nearest neighbor regression function estimators and their
application in optimization,". But my favorite was "The strong
uniform consistency of nearest neighbor density estimates,".
It explained many things that were troubling me. - OK, just
kidding, but he did write those things, and many more with
equally consternating titles.
“So all these font facts are apparently in good hands.” - Dennis
: )
