Professor Jarosław Bartoszewicz
(1945-2013)
Jarosław Bartoszewicz was born on July 22, 1945 in Różanka near Nowogródek (now in Belarus). He received his school education in Legnica, a town in Lower Silesia. From 1964 to 1969 he studied mathematics at the Wrocław University and earned his M.Sc. diploma. After graduating, he started working at the Wrocław University, and spent the rest of his career there. In June 1973, he defended his doctoral dissertation Estimation of reliability in the exponential model, written under supervision of Bolesław Kopciński. In 1987, he obtained his habilitation degree based on the habilitation thesis Robust estimation of the scale parameter. In September 2009, he was nominated by President of Poland for the title of full professor in mathematical sciences. He passed away on February 24, 2013, in Wrocław.
The research career of Jarosław Bartoszewicz was mostly influenced by Bolesław Kopociński and Witold Klonecki, as well as the seminars on applications of mathematics organized by Józef Łukaszewicz. Professor Bartoszewicz worked mainly in the areas of mathematical statistics and reliability theory. He wrote 39 research papers devoted to three groups of problems: unbiased estimation of the exponential reliability, robust scale estimation in parametric models under violations generated by stochastic orders, and characterizations, properties, and applications of stochastic orderings and families of probability distributions generated by stochastic orders.
The most important results obtained by Professor Bartoszewicz concern relationships between classes of lifetime distributions and stochastic orders, in particular characterizations of the star and dispersive orderings via the Laplace transform. Other interesting results are connected with the weighted distributions and related problems of preservation of classes of probability distributions and stochastic orders under weighting. Yet another remarkable contribution is the construction of goodness-of fit tests under the alternatives ordered in the dispersive order. In the monograph Stochastic orders (Springer Series in Statistics, 2007) by M. Shaked and J.G. Shanthikumar, 16 papers of Bartoszewicz were cited, and some his theorems were presented with the original proofs.
Jarosław Bartoszewicz organized several Polish national statistical conferences. He was invited for presenting lectures at international conferences in France, India and Turkey. He was the chief co-editor of Applicationes Mathematicae, and a member of the Mathematical Statistics Section of the Committee of Mathematics of Polish Academy of Sciences. For his research achievements, he was awarded a prize of Minister of Science, Higher Education and Technology in 1974, and the prestigious Hugo Steinhaus Prize of the Polish Mathematical Society in 2000.
For many years, Professor Bartoszewicz delivered lectures on mathematical statistics and their applications for students. He wrote Lectures on Mathematical Statistics (PWN, 1989, 1996), the most competent textbook on mathematical statistics published by Polish author. He supervised more than eighty master theses and promoted five Ph.D. students in mathematics.