Mihai Horia Botez (18 November 1940 – 11 July 1995) was a Romanian mathematician and dissident, nicknamed "Romania's Sakharov" by the international press.
[1] A leading statistician, he played a key role in founding the study of futurology in the Eastern European country, before becoming a critic of the communist regime's catastrophic economic policies.
[2] He survived four suspicious attacks, including a stabbing, a car ramming, and a beating that left him hospitalized and which human rights groups blamed on the country's secret police, the Securitate.
Under the guidance of Gheorghe Mihoc, he studied an extension of the notion of Markov chain, obtaining his PhD in 1967 from the Mathematical Statistics Institute of the Romanian Academy.
[3] After visiting for several months in 1976 the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.,[4] he was fired the next year from his academic positions for expressing his dissidence to the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu.