William A. Massey

Born: 1956
Birthplace: Jefferson City, Missouri

A.B. (Mathematics) Princeton University 1977

Ph.D. (Mathematics) Stanford University (1981)
thesis: Non--Stationary Queues; advisor Joseph Keller

Dr. William A. Massey, Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering; Engineering Quadrangle; Princeton University; Princeton, NJ 08544

Dr. Massey's home page: http://www.princeton.edu/~wmassey/

Research Interests: Queueing Theory, Applied Probability, Stochastic Processes, Special Functions, and Performance Modelling of Telecommunication Systems.

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William A. Massey was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, as the youngest of two sons of Richard and Juliette Massey. He is a graduate of the public schools of St. Louis, Missouri and attended high school in University City, a suburb of St. Louis. After receiving a Harvard Book Award and a National Achievement Scholarship at University City High School, he entered Princeton University in 1973. There, he encountered his first real introduction to research mathematics in an honor calculus course taught by the late Ralph Fox. He wrote his undergraduate senior thesis, titled "Galois Connections on Local Fields,'' in algebraic number theory, under the direction of the late Bernard Dwork, and graduated from Princeton in 1977 with an A.B. in Mathematics (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi). That same year he was awarded a Bell Labs Cooperative Research Fellowship for minorities to attend graduate school in the department of mathematics at Stanford University. In 1981, he received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford and his thesis, titled "Non-Stationary Queues,'' was directed by Joseph Keller.

Since 1981, Dr. Massey has been a member of technical staff in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories, a division of Lucent Technologies. His research interests include Queueing Theory, Applied Probability, Stochastic Processes, Special Functions, and the Performance Modelling of Telecommunication Systems. He has published 50 papers in areas such as nonstationary queues, stochastic ordering, queueing networks, database theory, and wireless communications. One of his publications made him the co-author of a patent on server staffing.

In 2001, Massey has accepted the position of Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University/ He is Full Professor.

Working at Bell Labs, Dr. Massey became the first Cooperative Research Fellowship Program (CRFP) fellow to become a mentor of another CRFP fellow, Arlie Petters. In 1997, he was awarded the W. Lincoln Hawkins Mentoring Excellence Award at Bell Laboratories. This is their highest award for mentorship which recognizes his service in fostering the career growth and personal development of students and associates. In fact, he has seven research publications coauthored with minority students who have worked with him as summer employees at Bell Labs. Dr. Massey has co-organized all 7 of the CAARMS conferences, the annual Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences, which he co-founded in 1995, and founded of the Council for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences, and currently on the Executive Board of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) Under his guidance and vision, CAARMS has grown from an event offering only 12 research talks and 3 discussion sessions to one that also has tutorials, a graduate student poster session, a keynote speaker, and published proceedings. In fact, he has seven publications that are coauthored with minority students who have worked with him as summer employees at Bell Labs.

Dr. Massey is an internationally known researcher in applied probability and has coauthored papers with colleagues from Canada, France and Israel. He has given invited lectures at the American Mathematical Society (AMS) national conference, the AMS southeastern regional conference, the Congreso Nacional de la Sociedad Matematica Mexicana, the Bouchet Conference for African and African American Physicists and Mathematicians that was held in Ghana as well as conferences held in Canada and Germany. In 1996, he was given NAM's Distinguished Service Award and invited to give the William W. S. Claytor Lecture. He a member of AMS, INFORMS and SIAM and is currently on the Executive Board of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM). His hobbies include graphic design and photography. His interest in the former has resulted in the creation of the CAARMS logo, the Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (MAD) logo and the redesign of the NAM logo. As a result of his interest in photography, many of his photos of contemporary African American mathematicians have found a home on various webpages throughout the internet.

Quicktime Video of William Massey

Also see the web page: Who are the greatest Black Mathematicians?

Lecture Notes from Mathematics is 4-Dimensional (pdf).

Research Notes

Dr. Massey has published more than 50 papers in areas such as nonstationary queues, stochastic ordering, queueing networks, database theory, and wireless communications. For selected publications, see Dr. Massey's publication page. Below we have made a different selection.

Selected Publications

  1. Massey, W. A.; Morrison, J. A. Calculation of steady-state probabilities for content of buffer with correlated inputs. Bell System Tech. J. 57 (1978), no. 9, 3097--3117.
  2. Massey, William A. Open networks of queues: their algebraic structure and estimating their transient behavior. Adv. in Appl. Probab. 16 (1984), no. 1, 176--201.
  3. Massey, William A. An operator-analytic approach to the Jackson network. J. Appl. Probab. 21 (1984), no. 2, 379--393.
  4. Goodman, Jonathan B.; Massey, William A. The nonergodic Jackson network. J. Appl. Probab. 21 (1984), no. 4, 860--869.
  5. Massey, William A. Asymptotic analysis of the time dependent $M/M/1$ queue. Math. Oper. Res. 10 (1985), no. 2, 305--327.
  6. Massey, William A. A family of bounds for the transient behavior of a Jackson network. J. Appl. Probab. 23 (1986), no. 2, 543--549.
  7. Massey, William A.. Calculating exit times for series Jackson networks. J. Appl. Probab. 24 (1987), no. 1, 226--234.
  8. Massey, William A. Stochastic orderings for Markov processes on partially ordered spaces. Math. Oper. Res. 12 (1987), no. 2, 350--367.
  9. Baccelli, François; Massey, William A. On the busy period of certain classes of queueing networks. Computer performance and reliability (Rome, 1987), 3--11, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1988.
  10. A. G. Greenberg; Massey, William A. Simple, Efficient Computation of the Generalized Throughput of Jackson Networks, Proceedings of the 26th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, (1988).
  11. Baccelli, François; Massey, William A. A sample path analysis of the $M/M/1$ queue. J. Appl. Probab. 26 (1989), no. 2, 418--422.
  12. Baccelli, François; Massey, William A.; Towsley, Don Acyclic fork-join queuing networks. J. Assoc. Comput. Mach. 36 (1989), no. 3, 615--642.
  13. Massey, William A.; Srinivasan, Rengarajan A heavy traffic analysis for semi-open networks. Performance '90 (Edinburgh, 1990), 289--300, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1990.
  14. Massey, William A.; Srinivasan, Rengarajan A heavy traffic analysis for semi-open networks. Performance '90 (Edinburgh, 1990). Performance Evaluation 13 (1991), no. 1, 59--66.
  15. Massey, William A. Stochastic ordering for Markov processes on partially ordered spaces with applications to queueing networks. Stochastic orders and decision under risk (Hamburg, 1989), 248--260, IMS Lecture Notes Monogr. Ser., 19, Inst. Math. Statist., Hayward, CA, 1991.
  16. Massey, William A.; Whitt, Ward A probabilistic generalization of Taylor's theorem. Statist. Probab. Lett. 16 (1993), no. 1, 51--54.
  17. Massey, William A.; Whitt, Ward Networks of infinite-server queues with nonstationary Poisson input. Queueing Systems Theory Appl. 13 (1993), no. 1-3, 183--250.
  18. Eick, Stephen G.; Massey, William A.; Whitt, Ward The physics of the $M\sb t/G/\infty$ queue. Oper. Res. 41 (1993), no. 4, 731--742.
  19. S. Eick; Massey, W. A.; W. Whitt, Infinite-Server Queues with Sinusoidal Arrival Rates, Management Science, 39 (January 1993), pp. 241-252.
  20. Baccelli, François; Massey, William A.; Wright, Paul E. Determining the exit time distribution for a closed cyclic network. Theoret. Comput. Sci. 125 (1994), no. 1, 149--165.
  21. Massey, William A.; Whitt, Ward Unstable asymptotics for nonstationary queues. Math. Oper. Res. 19 (1994), no. 2, 267--291.
  22. Massey, William A.; Whitt, Ward An analysis of the modified offered-load approximation for the nonstationary Erlang loss model. Ann. Appl. Probab. 4 (1994), no. 4, 1145--1160.
  23. Massey, W. A.; W. Whitt, On the Modiied-Offered-Load Approximation for the Nonstationary Erlang Loss Model, The Fundamental Role of Teletraffic in the Evolution of Telecommunication Networks (14th International Teletraffic Congress). 1994, 145-153.
  24. Massey, W. A.; W. Whitt, The Highway PALM: A Stochastic Model to Capture Space and Time Dynamics in Wireless Communication Systems, The Fundamental Role of Teletraffic in the Evolution of Telecommunication Networks (14th International Teletraffic Congress), June 1994, pp. 503-512.
  25. K. Leung, Massey, W. A.; W. Whitt, Traffic Models for Wireless Communications Networks, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas on Communications, 12 (October 1994), pp. 1353-1364.
  26. Massey, W. A.; W. Whitt, A Stochastic Model to Capture Space and Time Dynamics in Wireless Communication Systems, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, 8 (1994), pp. 541-569.
  27. Mandelbaum, Avi; Massey, William A.  Strong approximations for time-dependent queues. Math. Oper. Res. 20 (1995), no. 1, 33--64.
  28. Dean, Nathaniel; Kelmans, A. K.; Lih, Keh-Wei; Massey, William A.; Winkler, Peter The spanning tree enumeration problem for digraphs. Graph theory, combinatorics, and algorithms, Vol. 1, 2 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992), 277--287, Wiley-Intersci. Publ., Wiley, New York, 1995.
  29. Massey, William A. Stability for queues with time varying rates. Stochastic networks (New York, 1995), 95--107, Lecture Notes in Statist., 117, Springer, New York, 1996.
  30. Massey, William A.; Whitt, Ward Peak congestion in multi-server service systems with slowly varying arrival rates. Queueing Systems Theory Appl. 25 (1997), no. 1-4,
  31. Massey, William A.; Clement McCalla, Ward Witt, Applications of the Infinite-Server Queue to the Management of Private Line Services. Proceedings of 1997 AT&T Services and Infrastructure Symposium (SIPS-97), Middletown, NJ, November 18-19, 1997, pp. 132-141.
  32. Massey, William A.; Whitt, Ward Uniform acceleration expansions for Markov chains with time-varying rates. Ann. Appl. Probab. 8 (1998), no. 4, 1130--1155.
  33. Mandelbaum, Avi; Massey, William A.; Reiman, Martin I. Strong approximations for Markovian service networks. Queueing Systems Theory Appl. 30 (1998), no. 1-2, 149--201.
  34. Massey, William A.; Srinivasan, Raj Steady state analysis with heavy traffic limits for semi-open networks. Stochastic models (Ottawa, ON, 1998), 331--352, CMS Conf. Proc., 26, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2000.
  35. Massey, William A. Mathematics is four dimensional. Council for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences, Vol. III (Baltimore, MD, 1997/Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), 147--158, Contemp. Math., 275, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2001.
  36. Hampshire, Robert C.; Massey, William A.; Mitra, Debasis; Wang, Qiong Provisioning for bandwidth sharing and exchange. Telecommunications network design and management (Boca Raton, FL, 2002), 207--225, Oper. Res./Comput. Sci. Interfaces Ser., 23, Kluwer Acad. Publ., Boston, MA, 2003.

references: communications with Massey, Mathematical Reviews, Petters on Massey

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