Grace Wahba

Timeline

1. 1956–1962

   Mathematics at Cornell and Maryland

   She grows up in Montclair, New Jersey, and earns a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Cornell in 1956. She completes a master's degree at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1962.

2. 1965–1966

   Wahba's problem and a Stanford PhD

   In 1965, while working at IBM on satellite data, she poses Wahba's problem: how best to orient a satellite from observations of its position relative to specific stars. As a working single mother, she completes her doctorate at Stanford in 1966, advised by Emanuel Parzen, with a thesis on cross spectral distribution theory for mixed spectra.

3. 1967

   First woman on Wisconsin's statistics faculty

   She joins the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1967 as its first female faculty member. Her work there centers on extracting information from large data sets, particularly in medicine.

4. 1970

   An early representer theorem

   In 1970, she and George Kimeldorf publish a paper linking Bayesian estimation on stochastic processes with smoothing by splines, giving the first statement of a representer theorem. The theorem shows that optimizing functions over infinite-dimensional spaces can be reduced to finite-dimensional problems. From the early 1970s, she develops theoretical foundations and computational algorithms for fitting smoothing splines to noisy data.

5. 1979–1990

   Generalized cross-validation and spline models

   In 1979, she coauthors "Generalized cross-validation as a method of choosing a good ridge parameter" with Gene Golub and Michael Heath, introducing the GCV criterion for selecting smoothing parameters automatically. Her 1990 monograph Spline Models for Observational Data builds on a series of papers with co-authors. Her methods are instrumental in the development of kernel-based algorithms such as support vector machines.

6. 1997–2000

   Elected to two academies

   She is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

7. 2021–2025

   Wahba Award and International Prize

   In 2021, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics establishes the Grace Wahba Award and Lecture in her honor. She wins the 2025 International Prize in Statistics for her work on smoothing splines, which transformed data analysis and machine learning. She is the fifth individual to receive the prize, which carries an $80,000 award.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor emerita at Wisconsin

   She retires from UW–Madison in August 2018 after a 51-year career there, having supervised the theses of 39 graduate students from four continents. She is Emerita IJ Schoenberg-Hilldale Professor of Statistics, Professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, and Professor of Computer Sciences (by courtesy) at UW–Madison.