Baxter died on November 8, 1996, at the age of 42 after a long struggle with lymphoma sustained with great courage and grace. A citizen of Great Britain, he earned his B.Sc. degree in statistics with First Class Honors in 1975 and his Ph.D. in 1980 from University College London. He joined the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1981 as an assistant professor and was tenured and promoted to associate professor of applied mathematics and statistics in 1985.
Dr. Baxter was internationally renowned for his work in applied probability and reliability theory. He published over forty-five papers and did extensive consulting in this area. The results of his work on separately maintained components have been incorporated in a widely used AT&T Bell Laboratories software package for calculating various characteristics of system availability. He also extended several classic theorems of reliability theory for discrete structures to continuous structures, using functions that he named continuum structure functions. Additionally he did research on the effects of air pollution on mortality.
Dr. Baxter conceived of and was Editor-in-Chief of Stochastic Modeling, a series of books published by Chapman and Hall of London from 1993 to the present. He was sought v vi out internationally by publishers of scholarly journals for his outstanding editorial services and served as a reviewer for thirty journals.