Puk-researchers honoured by SASA

The South African Statistical Association, (SASA), awarded the 2005 Herbert Sichel medal to two researchers of the Risk and Reward Analysis subprogram of the Business Mathematics and Informatics (BMI) Research Unit of the Northwest-University.  Professors Hennie Venter and Riaan de Jongh recieved this medal, which is awarded every year to members of SASA who have published the best paper during the previous year, in a peer-reviewed journal.

According to a press release, the title of their paper was Selecting an innovation distribution for Garch models to improve efficiency of risk and volatility estimation and appeared in the Journal of Risk (volume 6, number 3).

This is the second time that these two researchers have been honoured for their work in the last two years. In 2004, the editor of the Journal of Risk, Professor Philippe Jorion, of the University of California at Irvine, selected a related paper entitled Risk Estimation using the Normal Inverse Gaussian Distribution (which was also published in the journal) to appear in a book.

Professor De Jongh is also the director of the Centre for BMI and had this to say in the press release about his co-worker, professor Hennie Venter: “It is wonderful to have Hennie as a member of our risk analysis research team. He is a world-class researcher who has made many contributions to the application of statistical science. In the last 5 years, he changed his research focus to the application of statistical science in finance, and specifically in risk/reward analysis. This highlights his brilliance in solving mathematical problems. In 1986, I visited the University of Chicago and met Raj Bahadur, professor of Statistics at Chicago. He told me that Hennie was the best (statistics) student which Chicago ever had. (Hennie completed his MSc and Ph.D in Statistics at Chicago in two years). Not only is it an honour to have Hennie in our research program, but to be able to work with him on a paper is a truly intellectually stimulating and enlightening experience”.

According to the release, this is the fifth time that researchers of the BMI-unit receive the Herbert Sichel award. Professors Venter and Sarel Steel were the first recipients of the award in 1997. It has only been awarded 8 times in the past.

The director of the BMI research unit, Professor Koos Grobler, had the following to say about his team's achievements: “The Centre for BMI and the BMI research unit had a tremendous year. Not only did an international review committee rate the research programmes very highly, but we won the internationally acclaimed SAS Academic Intelligence Award (for bridging the gap between industry and academia), and now also the Sichel medal for the fifth time. This is a clear indication that our BMI and actuarial training programmes are of the highest standard. Top class research inevitably manifests in top class training!”
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Arno Carstens a well known South African performer had the crowd rocking this past weekend. Carstens preformed at Goodfellas to a packed crowd.

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