Rick Durrett received his Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1976. After nine years at UCLA and twenty-five at Cornell University, he moved to Duke University in 2010, where he is a professor of mathematics. He is the author of 8 books and more than 170 journal articles on a wide variety of topics, and he has supervised more than 40 Ph.D. students. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.