Early life and career
Ali was born in Patuakhali, British India (presently Bangladesh) on February 1, 1937. His parents were Mir Muazzam Ali, a Patuakhali lawyer, and Azifa Ali, an advocate for women's education. He spent his childhood in Patuakhali until graduating from Patuakhali Jubilee High English School in 1951. In 1953, Ali received his I. Sc. degree from Dhaka College. In 1956, he obtained his B.Sc. (Honors) degree and in 1957 his M.Sc. degree, both in statistics from University of Dhaka. After graduation, Ali was employed by the erstwhile government of Pakistan from 1958 until 1966. He held a wide array of statistical positions in various ministries of the government. In 1966, Ali, on leave of absence from his government position, completed his second master's degree in 1967 and a Ph.D. degree in 1969, both in mathematical statistics from the University of Toronto in Canada, under the supervision of Donald A. S. Fraser. [7]
Career in academia
In 1969, Ali began his academic career at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, US as an assistant professor of statistics, then became an associate professor in 1974 and a full professor in 1978. In 2000, he was named the George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Statistics. Upon Ali's retirement in 2007, he was appointed as the George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Statistics Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences.
During Ali's tenure at Ball State University, he published roughly 200 articles and presented over 120 papers at various professional meetings and universities worldwide. His earlier publications were on h-statistics, l-statistics, k-statistics and related finite sampling methods. Later his research focused on order statistics and statistical inference based on optimal spacing and goodness-of-fit procedures. He has also published in diverse areas such as ranking and selection, multivariate distributions, characterization, and mixtures of distributions. Most recently he has published in the areas of Bayesian inference and reliability theory. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, [8] a Fellow of the Institute of Statisticians, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and an Expatriate Fellow of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences. Ali has been a visiting professor at several universities and statistical institutes in the US, Canada, Bangladesh, India, Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
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