Georges Le Calvé, ISI Elected member since 1985, passed away on 14 July, 2020. He was 84 years old.
He spent his entire career at the University of Rennes 2. The University of Rennes is one of the oldest French universities founded in the fifteenth century by the Duke of Brittany. Georges first taught mathematics, then probability, before devoting rather quickly to statistics, working in particular on multivariate data analysis, exploratory data analysis and problems of metrics and distances. He was vice-president of this university for several years. In the early 1990s, he created a Professional University Institute in Computer and Statistical Engineering which was later transferred to the University of South Brittany in Vannes. Retired in 1996 at the age of 60, he continued to participate actively in research work well after that date.
Georges has been concerned throughout his career with meeting statisticians from other horizons. In particular, he organized in Rennes several international seminars, including in 1992 the Distancia conference on the problems of metrics and distances and in 2004 the AGROSTAT congress which facilitates meetings and exchanges between statisticians and users of statistics in the field of agro-sciences. He participated in several Franco-Portuguese cooperation projects in Multivariate Data Analysis and supervised in this context a Portuguese-French PhD. He was elected ISI member in 1985 and actively participated in several ISI sessions (now WSCs).
He had chaired the two main French associations of statisticians, the ASU (Association for Statistics and Its Uses) in 1988 and 1989 and the Statistical Society of Paris in 1993. This led him to play an essential role in the creation of the French Statistical Society in 1997 which resulted from the merger of several associations, and in particular the two he had chaired. He had put his vision and his energy at the service of the statistical community. In 2018, Georges published a book about his memories as a 7-year-old child, when his family was evacuated in the middle of the war from Lorient which was the main German base on the Atlantic and which was therefore subjected to very violent bombings from the allied forces. He evoked his daily life as a small city dweller who took refuge in a small village, Querrien, arriving in a rural environment with a large Breton speaking majority, while he only jabbered a few words of Breton.
Georges was greatly appreciated by his colleagues and friends. His joviality, his culture, his benevolence remain engraved in the memory of statisticians who have had the chance to cross him. We will miss him.
Jean-Louis Bodin
Gilbert Saporta
