G. P. Patil is Professor of Mathematical Statistics, The Pennsylvania State University. An expert with an international reputation for his research and leadership in the important subject areas of statistical distributions, stochastic models, and statistical ecology, Professor Patil is the author and co-author of 50 research publications and technical reports, and is General Editor of the Penn State Statistics Series, which now includes three volumes on Statistical Ecology and three earlier volumes on Random Counts in Scientific Work. He is also co-author with S. W. Joshi of Dictionary and Bibliography of Discrete Distributions (1968), and editor of Classical and Contagious Discrete Distributions (1965).
Professor Patil is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, an associate of the Indian Statistical Institute, and holds membership in ten other national and international scientific and honor societies. A graduate of the University of Poona in 1955, he earned his MS and PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1959, and subsequently taught at the University of Michigan and McGill University before joining the faculty at The Pennsylvania State University in 1964. In addition to his teaching, research, and writing activities, Professor Patil serves as consultant for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, and for the U. S. Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health.
E. C. Pielou is Professor of Mathematical Biology at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. She received both a BSc in Botany and a PhD in Statistical Ecology from the University of London. She has held two visiting professorships, one at North Carolina State University and the other at the Yale School of Forestry, and has served with the Canadian Department of Forestry and the Department of Agriculture as a Research Scientist in the Statistical Research Service.
Professor Pielou brings her experience as a field ecologist as well as a theoretician to this book. She has written many research papers in ecology, and has contributed to several international symposia in statistics and ecology.
W. E. Waters is Chief of Forest Insect Research, U.S. Forest Service, Washington, D.C. With training in forestry, entomology, biometry, and ecology, Dr. Waters has conducted research on the population ecology of forest insects for more than twenty years. His major interests have been the measurement and prediction of insect numbers over space and time, and the impacts of destructive insects on forest ecosystems. He has made significant contributions to the concepts and methodology of forest insect sampling and population dynamics.
Dr. Waters is a member of numerous U.S. and international organizations concerned with forest entomology, population dynamics, and related subject matter fields. He presently holds a faculty appointment as Lecturer in Epidemiology (Medical Entomology) at Yale University School of Medicine.
