  Yuan Shih Chow was born in Hubei province in China, on September 1, 1924. The
eldest child of a local militia and political leader, he grew up in war and
turmoil. His hometown was on the front line during most of the Japanese
invasion and occupation of China. When he was 16, Y. S. Chow journeyed, mostly
on foot, to Chongqing (Chung-King), the wartime Chinese capital, to finish his
high school education. When the Communist party gained power in China, Y. S.
Chow had already followed his university job to Taiwan. In Taiwan, he taught
mathematics as an assistant at National Taiwan University until he came to the
United States in 1954. At the University of Illinois, he studied under J. L.
Doob and received his Ph.D. in 1958. He served as a staff mathematician and
adjunct faculty at the IBM Watson Research Laboratory and Columbia University
from 1959 to 1962. He was a member of the Statistics Department at Purdue
University from 1962 to 1968. From 1968 until his retirement in 1993, Y. S.
Chow served as Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Columbia University. At
different times, he was a visiting professor at the University of California at
Berkeley, University of Heidelberg (Germany) and the National Central
University, Taiwan. He served as Director of the Institute of Mathematics of
Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and Director of the Center of Applied Statistics at
Nankai University, Tianjin, China. He was instrumental in establishing the
Institute of Statistics of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He is currently Professor
Emeritus at Columbia University. Y. S. Chow is a fellow of the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics, a member of the International Statistical Institute
and a member of Taiwan's Academia Sinica. He has numerous publications,
including Great Expectations: The Theory of Optimal Stopping (1971), in
collaboration with Herbert Robbins and David Siegmund, and Probability Theory
(1978), in collaboration with Henry Teicher. Y. S. Chow has a strong interest
in mathematics education. He taught high school mathematics for one year in
1947 and wrote a book on high school algebra in collaboration with J. H. Teng
and M. L. Chu. In 1992, Y. S. Chow, together with I. S. Chang and W. C. Ho,
established the Chinese Institute of Probability and Statistics in Taiwan. This
conversation took place in the fall of 2003 in Dobbs Ferry, New York.
