Stephen Mitchell Samuels (1938, Brooklyn – July 26, 2012, Indiana) was a statistician and mathematician, known for his work on the secretary problem[1] and for the Samuels Conjecture involving a Chebyshev-type inequality for sums of independent, non-negative random variables.[2][3]
After completing his undergraduate degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became a graduate student at Stanford University.[1] There he received his Ph.D. in 1964 with a thesis supervised by Samuel Karlin.[4] Samuels joined in 1964 the faculty of Purdue University and retired there in 2003 as professor emeritus of statistics and mathematics.[1] He did research on various topics in probability theory and its applications, dynamic optimization, and disclosure risk assessment for statistical microdata.[5]