  Julian Besag was an outstanding statistical scientist, distinguished for his
pioneering work on the statistical theory and analysis of spatial processes,
especially conditional lattice systems. His work has been seminal in
statistical developments over the last several decades ranging from image
analysis to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. He clarified the role of
auto-logistic and auto-normal models as instances of Markov random fields and
paved the way for their use in diverse applications. Later work included
investigations into the efficacy of nearest neighbour models to accommodate
spatial dependence in the analysis of data from agricultural field trials,
image restoration from noisy data, and texture generation using lattice models.
