ON THE EARLY HISTORY OF PROBASTAT

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues,

It is unbelievable, but the conference named PROBASTAT started precisely 50 years ago, in 1974.

At that time, we got the idea that emerging probabilistic and statistical activities in Slovakia needed conference support. We proposed the name “PROBASTAT” and organized the first set of such meetings, which until 1990 was limited to Czechoslovak participants only. Since the organization was much simpler than today, only two of us, Silvia Pulmannova and I organized PROBASTAT almost every year: once in Bratislava and five times in the beautiful Smolenice Castle. A little later, PROBASTAT was held twice in the lovely mountain town of Liptovský Mikuláš, organized by local people. You can see the years and places of these meetings on the slide.

It would be tedious to list the titles of all contributions, even of the invited lectures, and I consider it more important to list a few names of the most prominent speakers. Pioneering names from our country appeared at the first conferences. Anton Huťa, a specialist in numerical mathematics, was the first to introduce lectures in probability at our university. Tibor Newbrunn and Beloslav Riečan later did significant work in the measure theory, probability, and the education of capable students. Lubomír Kubáček founded the first serious, very successful department of mathematical statistics in Slovakia, namely the Institute of Measurement of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. I came from this department, and it is worth mentioning that today, the leader of this department and this institute is just Viktor Witkovsky.

Significant participants in all PROBASTAT conferences were Czech probabilists and statisticians, most from Prague. Their importance, especially in the first years, has been twofold: They were members of the emerging essential Prague school of statistics, grounded by the famous Professor Hajek. Secondly, they enjoyed the surroundings of this castle and organized famous social evenings and trips to Záruby, the highest peak of the Little Carpathians. I still remember very well the perfect evening singer Josef Machek, the young Josef Štepán who had a brilliant mind not only for probability but also for common social discussions, the very sympatric Marie Hušková, the active Jan Hurt, who initiated a night visit to the village Smolenice, and so on.

We had well-known Czech speakers at all conferences, including international ones. The list of their names is long; let us mention at least some of them: Jana Jurečková, Zuzana Prášková, Jiří Anděl, Karel Winkelbauer, Peter Mandl, Zbyněk Šidák, Albert Perez, Igor Vajda, and later the well-known but much, much younger Jaromír Antoch.

In 1991, after the political changes, we organized the first international PROBASTAT in Bratislava in the University buildings. The organizing team was now much bigger, and the number of participants and sections was even too significant. Therefore, it was decided to split PROBASTAT into two separate conferences in the future: one focused on probability theory and the other on statistics. Only the conference on statistics kept its original name, and returned back to Smolenice, this time for good. We organized 6 international PROBASTATs in Smolenice, the last one in 2015. Because of a lack of time, I shall speak briefly just about the 1994 conference, which may be the most impressive one. This was mainly due to the fact that we invited Professor C.R. Rao, who was 74 years old at that time. His work had a great impact on research in statistics in Slovakia, and therefore, the SAS awarded him the honorary title of Doctor of Sciences.

In general, we welcomed at this conference a truly international participation of almost 80 distinguished scholars from Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, the UK, Greece, Hungary, India, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, USA, and, of course, Slovakia. Just a few names of participants: A. C. Atkinson, T. Calinski, Ch. Mueller, F. Pukelsheim, N. Gaffke, L. LaMotte, S. R. Searle, P. K. Sen, A. LeBreton, L. Pronzato, J. A. Víšek, I. Vincze, M. Janžura.

It is interesting to notice that Friedrich Pukelsheim from Germany liked the conference so much that he proposed to edit a special issue of the journal Metrika with selected presentations from the conference in addition to the regular proceedings.

In the end, it was a social curiosity. Two women participants from the eastern part of Europe, Julia Volaufová from Slovakia and Barbara Bogacka from Poland left their home countries practically immediately after the conference to join “forever” prominent participants from the west, Lynn LaMotte from the USA and Anthony Atkinson from London, UK. They all remained regulars at other PROBASTATs, but unfortunately, not this year.

Please note that the 1994 conference was just 30 years ago. Was it a long time ago, or was it just yesterday? In any case, it is time for me to stop speaking about PROBASTAT and leave the later history to the incisive colleagues younger than myself.

I wish you a lovely week in Smolenice.