Howell Tong is a pioneer and an acknowledged authority in the field of nonlinear time series analysis, linking it with deterministic chaos. He is the father of the threshold time series models, which have extensive applications in ecology, economics, epidemiology and finance.
Life
Since October 1, 2009, he has been an Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and was twice holder of the Saw Swee Hock Professorship of Statistics at the National University of Singapore. He was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Statistics at the University of Hong Kong from 2005 to 2013. He is currently a Distinguished Professor-at-Large, University of Electronic Science & Technology, China and a Distinguished Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University, China. Tong, a scholarship boy, left Wah Yan College 香港華仁書院 in Hong Kong in 1961 and was sent by his father to complete his matriculation at the Barnsbury School for Boys in North London. He got his Bachelor of Science in 1966, Master of Science in 1969 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1972, all from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, where he studied under Maurice Priestley. Tong remained at UMIST first as a lecturer and then as a senior lecturer. While in Manchester, he started his married life with Ann Mary Leong. In 1982, he moved to the Chinese University of Hong Kong as the founding Chair of Statistics. Four years later, he returned to England to be Chair of Statistics at the University of Kent at Canterbury until 1999. He was the first ethnic Chinese to hold a chair of statistics in the UK. From 1999 to September 2009, Tong was Chair of Statistics at the London School of Economics and founded the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series. Between 1997 and 2004, Tong was also Chair Professor of Statistics, Founding Dean of the Graduate School and later Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Hong Kong. Tong was elected a member of the International Statistical Institute in 1983. In 1986, he was the session organiser and an invited speaker of the session on time series analysis, at the First World Congress of the Bernoulli Society, held at Tashkent in the former Soviet Union. In 1994, he was the Special Plenary Lecturer at the 15th Nordic Meeting in Mathematical Statistics, held at Lund, Sweden. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1993, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries, England in 1999, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2000. In 2000, he became the first statistician to win the State Prize in Natural Sciences in China. In 2002, the University of Hong Kong gave him their then-highest award, the Distinguished Research Achievement Award, carrying with it a research grant of HK$1,000,000 per annum for three years. The Royal Statistical Society, UK, awarded him their Guy Medal in Silver in 2007 in recognition of his "...many important contributions to time series analysis over a distinguished career and in particular for his fundamental and highly influential paper "Threshold autoregression, limit cycles and cyclical data", read to the Society in 1980, which paved the way for a major body of work in non-linear time series modelling." In 2012, the International Chinese Statistical Association awarded him the Distinguished Achievement Award. In 2014, he held a Senior fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna, Italy. Tong has one son, one daughter and three grand-children.
