Kai-Tai Fang

Selected university offices and honors Fang is Director of Institute of Statistics and Computational Intelligence and Emeritus Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, The Hong Kong Baptist University honored Professor Fang with the President's Award for Outstanding Performance in Scholarly Work in 2001. by the Government Information and Publication Administration. Fang reported that his studies were halted for the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976.

After graduating from Peking University, he undertook postgraduate studies at the Institute of Mathematics of Academia Sinica, which had less "political chaos" than Peking University, according to Fang.

Revival of academic life Fang was successively appointed to be assistant researcher and assistant professor in 1978.

Multivariate analysis Fang has contributed to the theory of elliptical distributions, like bivariate normal distribution (pictured), which have elliptical contours.

In mathematical statistics, Fang has published textbooks and monographs in multivariate analysis. In particular, his books have extended classical multivariate analysis beyond the multivariate normal distribution to a generalized multivariate analysis using more general elliptical distributions, which have elliptically contoured distributions.

His book on Generalized multivariate analysis (with Zhang) has extensive results on multivariate analysis for elliptical distributions, to which T. W. Anderson refers readers of his An introduction to multivariate statistical analysis (3rd ed., 2003). The Fang and Zhang monograph used matrix differential calculus. Fang and Zhang's Generalized multivariate analysis was honored as a "most excellent book in China" by the Government Information and Publication Administration.

Fang recognized that high-dimensional combinatorial designs, which had been used for numerical integration on the unit cube by Hua Luogeng and Wang Yuan, could be used to study interaction, for example, in factorial experiments and response surface methodology. Collaborating with Wang led to Fang's uniform designs, which have been used also in computer simulations.