Thomas Shelburne Ferguson (born December 14, 1929) is an American mathematician and statistician.
[1] His dissertation had two separately-titled parts, On Existence of Linear Regression in Linear Structural Relations and A Method of Generating Best Asymptotically Normal Estimates with Application to the Estimation of Bacterial Densities; it was supervised by Lucien Le Cam.
[2] Ferguson is the author of: His research contributions include the analysis of the "big match" zero-sum game with David Blackwell, a result that eventually led to the proof of existence of equilibrium values for limiting average payoff in all stochastic games; the Ferguson distribution on prior probability; Ferguson's Dirichlet process;[1] Ferguson's pairing property in the analysis of misère subtraction games;[1][6] and contributions to the theory of optimal stopping as e.g. co-authored work on Robbins' problem.
A festschrift in Ferguson's honor edited by F. Thomas Bruss and Lucien Le Cam was published in 2000.
[1][7] He has coauthored papers with Chris Ferguson on the mathematics of poker and other games of chance.