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On September, 16, 2011, Mario Wschebor died in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he was born in 1939. He had a profound influence in the development of Mathematics, and Probability, in particular, in several Latin-American countries.
Mario studied Electromechanical Engineering at the Universidad de la República, in Uruguay and then travelled to Hungary and France, where he obtained a Doctorat de Troisième Cycle, at the Université de Paris-Sud in 1972, under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Kahane. During the years of the military dictatorship in Uruguay, he lived in Argentina and later in Venezuela, where he spent 10 years working at the Universidad Simón Bolívar and the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. He returned to Uruguay in 1987 and resumed his work at the Universidad de la República, where he promoted the creation of the Science Faculty, and was its first Dean, a post he held between 1990 and 1998. He was also a member of the University Council.
He worked mainly in Probability Theory and Statistics, and made important contributions in several areas. He published a series of works on the distribution of the supremum of random processes, random crossings and level sets, some of them in collaboration with Enrique Cabaña, where Rice’s formula is generalized. In another series of papers, he considered the regularity of paths of stochastic processes, properties of their local time, the problem of observing an irregular process and mathematical models of sample path regularization, the approximation of local times and related statistical problems. More recently, inspired on problems proposed by S. Smale, he was interested in solutions to systems of random equations and the probabilistic analysis of condition numbers, for which he used Rice’s formula. He wrote a book in collaboration with Jean-Marc Azaïz entitled ‘Level sets and extrema of random processes and fields’, published by Wiley in 2009, on Rice’s method for the study of the distribution of the maximum of random processes and fields.
Mario was an important factor in the development and consolidation of mathematics in several countries of Latin America and in the region as a whole. He had a profound influence in the development of mathematics in general and probability, in particular, during his stay in Venezuela, where he helped in the consolidation of the area. It was during this period that he promoted, along with E. Cabaña, the foundation of the Latin American Regional Committee of the Bernoulli Society in the early 1980’s and was its chairman for the period 1985-1989. He took a very active part in the establishment of the Mathematical Union of Latin America and the Caribbean (UMALCA) and was its first chairman (1995--2001), was a member of the administrative council of the International Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics (CIMPA) and was its president for the period 2005-2009. He promoted the creation of the France-Uruguay Mathematics Institute; an international laboratory associated to the CNRS, which he initially coordinated, and later was head of the Probability and Statistics area.
But above his achievements, Mario will be remembered by those who knew him as a warm and open person, always ready to discuss mathematics, with unending energy and enthusiasm for his work. His clear and deep vision of Mathematics and its fundamental role in the change of underdeveloped societies, and his unstinting work to establish structures that would promote its development will be strongly missed.
Mario was a council member of the Bernoulli Society.
Joaquín Ortega, Guanajuato