Louis Sucheston

Louis Sucheston (born October 9, 1925, in Cracow, Poland, deceased June 5, 2013 in Clearwater, Florida, USA,was a US-American mathematician known for his contributions to ergodic theory, optimal stopping and asymptotic martingales.The Prophet inequality
of Krengel, Sucheston and Garling [6] and the 0-2-law of Ornstein-Sucheston are co-named after him.
==Biographical data==
L.S. was the son of Marcel Nathan Suchestow and Leonora Horsowzka [1]. He obtained the " Licence ès Sciences" in Physics at the University of Paris in 1952, and then worked as electronics engineer in France. In 1955, he immigrated to USA. He became a naturalized citizen of the USA in 1961. In 1959, he obtained a PhD-degree in Mathematics at Wayne State University. His dissertation " On Intersections of Measurable Sets" was directed by George Gunther Lorenz [2]. He was Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester and at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (1958-1963), and Associate Professor (1963-1966) at the Ohio State University. He was Full Professor at Ohio State (1966-1993). He held Guest Professorships at the University of Rennes and at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver and repeatedly at the University of Paris VI and at the University of Goettingen.
After his retirement in 1993, he moved to Clearwater (Florida). He joined the Clearwater Bridge Club and became a Silver Life Master [1].
He was repeatedly married and had four children: Vanda Sucheston Hughes, Tony Ludwik Sucheston, Marcel Kelly Sucheston and Lara Elaine Sucheston-Campbell.
==Research==
6 The prophet inequality of Krengel, Sucheston and Garling [6] is a surprizing result in the theory of optimal stopping. The decision maker can sucessively observe a known number n of independent nonnegative random variables with known (possibly different) distributions. When he decides to stop after the k-th obervation, the value of this last observation is his gain. The prophet inequality asserts, that, if he uses the optimal strategy, his expected gain is at least half that of a prophet, who sees the future and therefore can always chose the maximal one of the n observations. This touched off a considerable number of publications. A monograph is devoted to this topic [3].
 
A book by Cairoli and Dalang dealing with multidimensional stochastic optimization [4] presents many results of Krengel and L.S. [7]. In particular, the entire chapter 4 is devoted to presenting their "linear embedding theorem" and extending it from the case of independent identically distributed random variables to exchangeable random variables. This theorem provides a method for reducing a number of two-dimensional stopping problems to the one-dimensional case.
A. Brunel and L.S. contributed significantly to the geometry of Banach spaces. A. Millet and L.S. worked on amarts and solved several problems in the theory of martingales with several parameters open for more than 20 years. M.Akcoglu and L.S. gave important generalizations of theorems of Rota and Stein.
==Honors and Awards==
8 He was an invited speaker at the Centennial Meeting of the Circolo Mathematico di Palermo (1984). .In November 1988, he was awarded the U.S. Senior Distinguished Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
==Selected publications==
10 L.S. published more than 100 scientific articles. Frequent collaborators were A. M. Akcoglu, A. Brunel, G. A. Edgar, U. Krengel and A. Millet. He published one book:
G.A.Edgar and L.S. : Stopping Times and Directed Processes. Encyclopedia of Mathematic and Applications 47, Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-35023-9.
Articles:
A. Brunel and L.S. On J-convexity and some ergodic properties of Banach spaces. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 1075.
G.A. Edgar and L.S. :Amarts: A Class of Asymptotic Martingales. Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 1976.
A. Millet and L.S. : Convergence of Classes of Amarts indexed by a directed Set. 1980.
D. Ornstein and L.S. : An Operator Theorem on L1-Convergence to zero with Applications to Markov Kernels. Ann. Meth. Stat. 1970.
==Weblinks==
Publications by L.S.: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Louis+Sucheston&btnG=
Category:1925 births
Category:People from Kraków
Category:American people