Join us on Thursday February 13 at 2PM in Rocky 300 for the second of two Henry Seely White Lectures delivered by Professor Xiao-Li Meng, Harvard University.

Note:  This is the second of two lectures in the Henry Seely White Lecture Series. The first lecture is on Wednesday February 12 at 4PM.

Title: From a Cauchy Surprise to the Half-Cauchy Miracle

Abstract: This talk follows the path from Pillai and Meng (2016, Annals of Statistics), “An Unexpected Encounter with Cauchy and Lévy,” to Liu, Meng, and Pillai (2025, arXiv:2501.01065), “A Heavily Right Strategy for Integrating Dependent Studies in Any Dimension,” inviting the audience to join a journey to explore an emerging and mystic force in statistical inference: heavy-tail approximations.