In 1989, the Statistics Program of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University was awarded an Academic Challenge Enhancement Grant from the Ohio Board of Regents. The centerpiece of this Challenge Grant was the establishment of a Eugene Lukacs Visiting Professorship in Statistics. The late Eugene Lukacs, a member of the department from 1972-1976, was a distinguished statistician who was internationally renowned for his contributions to statistics and probability. Lukacs’ primary interest was in the theory of characteristic functions. His 1960 monograph Characteristic Functions was the first to present a unified and detailed treatment of the subject and this book continues to be of great use to analytic probabilists. Lukacs was the first professor at Bowling Green State University to be given the title of University Professor.

The intent of the Lukacs Professorship is to bring research statisticians and probabilists of the stature of Eugene Lukacs to Bowling Green State University. The visitor typically will present a series of seminars on his or her area of research expertise and interact with the probability and statistics faculty and students in the department. In addition, the Lukacs Professor, in collaboration with the department, has the opportunity to organize a conference, the Lukacs Symposium, during the spring semester in Bowling Green. Gabor Székely was the first Lukacs Professor in 1990-1991 and organized the First Lukacs Symposium. Since its inception, there have been a total of thirteen Lukacs Professors, and their research interests have spanned a wide variety of topics in statistics and probability.