IAMG: Matheron Lecturer 2019

Dr. Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn (our CoDa-Association past President: 2015-2017) has been selected Matheron Lecturer 2019 by the Lectures Committee of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG). This lecture series in honor of  Georges Matheron,a  leader in the field of geostatistics, was initiated in 2005, and the first lecture was given in 2006 at the IAMG Annual Meeting in Liège, Belgium. The Lectures Committee is chaired by a Vice President, who selects two (2) other members of the Association familiar with the work of Georges Matheron. The Committee selects each year a Georges Matheron Lecturer who is a scientist with proven research ability in the field of spatial statistics or mathematical morphology. The Director of the École des Mines Centre de Géostatistiques in Fontainebleau (France) serves as non-voting member ex officio.

The main reason to nominate Dr. Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn was that her seminal work on compositional data is one of the branches which emanates from the core of linear geostatistics created by Georges Matheron.

But there is also another reason. This year, Oxford University Press will publish “Matheron's Theory of Regionalized Variables”, a book she has edited jointly with Dr. Jean Serra. Matheron wrote this text in 1971, as an external report of the Centre de Géostatistique, but it was never published. However, it has always been considered as the bible by generations of geostatisticians.