โ Scribed by C. C. Heyde
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Tragically he passed away on 7 June 2001 at the age of 53. He had known that his heart was not in good condition but chose to maintain his characteristic high level of activity.
Richard's major research was in the structure and application of Markov chains and related areas. Much of this is summarized in his monograph Markov Chains and Stochastic Stability written jointly with S.P. Meyn and published by Springer in 1993. This won the ORSA/TIMS Award for the best research publication in Applied Probability in 1994. Perhaps the most important of his work is the provision of simple criteria leading to the classification of firreducible Markov chains on general-state-spaces following on from the observation that the step from integer-valued chains to general ones was straightforward and important to take. This work has led to many results about the stability of Markov processes. He also obtained many results concerning geometric ergodicity and rates of convergence for Markov chains. More recently he did considerable work on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.
Outside the Markov chain area Richard did significant work on meta-analysis and in applied statistics, especially in epidemiology, biological modelling, and in estimation in stochastic models. These interests developed out of consulting during his time with CSIRO and later with Siromath. He was a profile publisher and, in all, produced some 140 papers.
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