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South African statistician bootstraps his way through life
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Recently, Dr. Hennie Venter received an honorary doctorate from North-West University at Potchefstroom in South Africa, due to distinguished service in statistics and mathematics in South Africa and beyond during a career marked by extraordinary contributions over a wide range of application areas. He is considered one of the most outstanding statisticians that South Africa has yet produced. But who is Hennie Venter and what kind of bootstrapping did he take on?
Johannes Hendrik (Hennie) Venter began life on 17 April 1938 in Johannesburg, South Africa. At Potchefstroom University (now North-West University) he studied for a BSc in Physics, because nuclear physics was in vogue among aspiring scientists, but he added statistics as an extra subject for his degree when it was launched as a new field of study. After completing honors in mathematics, a position in statistics prompted him to switch to statistics for his MSc. As a new department at Potchefstroom, he had to work through advanced books mostly on his own. This initial bootstrapping laid the foundation for exceptional research ability.
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"Risk managers tend to focus on risk exclusively. Simply closing the business down will reduce risk to zero and from a risk only point of view, you cannot do better. But this "solution" is seldom acceptable since no reward follows. Thus risk should always be managed jointly with the associated rewards. The combined objective of Risk/Reward Management is a better goal to strive for." Hennie Venter
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Venter received a grant to study at the University of Chicago, which showed interest in this "unknown student" from an "unknown department," based in part on some research reports that he attached to his application. These self-formulated research problems and his proposed solutions, begun during his undergraduate years, showed impressive promise. Arriving in Chicago, he realized he had an extremely thin basis in statistics, but once again he bootstrapped his way through, obtaining an MSc as well as a PhD in 2 years, an especially remarkable feat given his insufficient technical background. He took courses with such well-known statisticians as Kruskal, Billingsley, Meier, Goodman, and Bahadur, who became his advisor. Bahadur suggested he write about stochastic approximation, a very hot topic at the time, but in typical Venter style he did so but very much using his own approach.
After a year at Stanford as assistant professor, he returned to South Africa to his original alma mater, inspite of lucrative offers from the University of Chicago and others.
Venter spent the next 35 years at Potchefstroom, building up their Department of Statistics through a steady stream of both students and outstanding publications in most of the prestigious journals until his retirement in 1998. Venter's ability to combine his extraordinary talents in pure mathematics with theoretical and practical statistics enabled him to solve many practical problems in many application areas of statistics. His research publications show the wide impact of his work and an ahead-of-his time preference for solving practical problems across many areas of statistics, as opposed to specialization in a narrow field.
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Venter's deep insight into mathematical techniques and tools needed to solve problems is neatly illustrated by involvement in the emerging field of financial risk and reward management and analysis in 2000, another example of his bootstrapping approach to life. His first publication in an internationally recognized peer-reviewed journal appeared as early as 2002. His first two papers were selected to appear in two books containing leading-edge research in the area of risk management and analysis (Innovations in Risk Management: Seminal Papers from the Journal of Risk, edited by Philippe Jorion, and The Value at Risk Reference: Key Issues in the Implementation of Market Risk, edited Jon Danielsson).
Venter played a leading role in the South African Statistical Journal, contributing the first paper in the first issue (and generously continuing to contribute some of his high quality papers in the early years) and serving early terms on the editorial board and as editor. In 1970, he served as president of South African Statistical Association, which awarded him their prestigious Sichel medal in 1996 and 2005 and elected him as fellow and honorary member. He served his country by participating on the advice committees of the governmental South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the National Research Foundation, and Statistics South Africa. He received the South African Academy of Science and Art's Havenga gold medal for Mathematics in 1988 and their MT Steyn gold medal for the advancement of science in 1999.
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"Whether you want to manipulate small or gigantic data sets, do simple calculations or run advanced analytical models, use existing statistical, mathematical or computational methods or develop and program your own, produce summary or detailed reports, SAS provides superb tools!" Hennie Venter |
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Venter has made outstanding and extremely original contributions to the theory and practice of statistics. But in spite of exceptional mathematical and statistical talents, his greatest contribution has been his willingness to share his ideas, insight and knowledge with co workers, colleagues and students. His favorite quote, by organizational theorist James March, illustrates his philosophy: "In the end, you know, we are very minor blips in a cosmic story. Aspirations for importance or significance are the illusions of the ignorant. All our hopes are minor, except to us; but some things matter because we choose to make them matter. What might make a difference to us, I think, is whether in our tiny roles, in our brief time, we inhabit life gently and add more beauty than ugliness."
At 70 he is still extremely active and creative, working full time as a consultant to the Centre for Business Mathematics and Informatics® of North-West University in the field of financial statistics and risk analysis. Venter does most of his programming work in SAS and SAS South Africa has been fortunate to count on his strong support.
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