Professor Emeritus Charles Stein, a quiet presence in Stanford’s statistics department, where he was hired in 1953, took the long view. An extraordinarily humble man of great brilliance, he was so demanding of himself and his work that he published little, and his greatest contributions to the fields of probability and statistics often appeared in the papers of his students or collaborators. As his son, Charles Jr., remembers him saying, “Unless your work is read 200 years after your death, you haven’t really accomplished much.”
Charles M. Stein died in Fremont, Calif., on November 24. He was 96.
He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a father who was often away at sea, and to a mother who was not highly educated but who instilled in her children a keen sense of the primary importance of learning. He served in the Air Force in World War II, and his leftist views were formed early, in response to the rise of fascism in Europe. His refusal to sign a loyalty oath cost him a job at UC-Berkeley during the McCarthy period, and he was the first member of the Stanford faculty to be arrested, in 1985, in antiapartheid protests. Despite his statistical work on the weather for the Air Force, he made it a point of pride not to work on military projects.
Stein liked to attack a problem from the ground up, never relying on other people’s scaffolding, and he was notorious for coming up with counterexamples that refuted what everyone else believed was true. He was impatient with textbooks and preferred to present material based on his own engagement with a subject. As he said in an interview in Statistical Science in 1986, “Somehow, I don’t seem to think along the same lines as other people, which is useful.”
At the end of his long life, Stein was asked by visiting clergy in the hospice what had made him happy. Charles Jr. recalls that his father preferred to measure one’s life by what one has accomplished, and yet, he pursued numerous interests that gave him pleasure: his love of travel and good food, of opera and theater, his facility with languages, his passion for hiking. He would no doubt take comfort from a tribute written by his former student, Professor Emeritus Louis Chen of the National University of Singapore: “I owe my career to his beautiful and profound ideas. . . . He lives on in the memory of many of us who have known him, and of course also in his work.”
Stein’s wife of 62 years, Margaret, died a few months before his passing. He is survived by his son, two daughters, Sara and Anne, and a grandson.
Vicky Elliott is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
