James (Jim) Pickands III, an emeritus professor in the Wharton School’s department of statistics, passed away on March 9. He was 90.

Born in Euclid, Ohio, Dr. Pickands received his BA from Taft University, then went on to receive a master’s degree from Yale and a PhD from Columbia, where he wrote a dissertation (“Maxima of Stationary Gaussian Processes”) in 1965 under eminent statistician Simeon Berman. After graduating, Dr. Pickands served in the U.S. Army in Maryland. He joined Wharton’s faculty in 1969 as an associate professor of statistics and operations research, where he was considered an asset to the department. While at Wharton, he built a reputation as a highly regarded mathematical statistician and made seminal contributions to the study of extreme values; he published and lectured widely on the Central Limit Theorem and on Gaussian processes. He mentored junior faculty and PhD students with a theoretical bent and advised several students’ dissertations. Dr. Pickands was also an involved member of Penn’s faculty, serving on multiple University Council committees throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He was promoted to a full professor in 1984; twelve years later, he retired and took emeritus status.

Dr. Pickands is survived by his wife, D. Morgan; his first wife, Nancy McCulloch; his daughter, Holly Pickands McLaughlin; his step-children, Jill Lydia Kahlenberg and Jason Wesley Smith; his siblings, Maude (Charles) Thompson, Sarah (Richard Dutton), and Martin Pickands; two grandchildren, eight step-grandchildren; and many other relatives. A military burial will be held in the undetermined future.

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