<p>Shao is Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where George Box established the Stats Dept. in 1960.</p><p><br/></p><p>From the reviews of the second edition:</p><p>"The second edition of Mathematical Statistics  continues to hold its identity among many other available books on mathematical statistics...The revised and updated version remains of high quality, and I recommend it for use as a text or reference book in a graduate statistics program." Journal of the American Statistical Association, September 2004</p><p>"The first edition of this book was published in 1999 … . The main changes include addition of new material in Chapter 1, addition and deletion of a number of exercises, addition of two new sub-sections … . The book remains valuable to instructors and graduate students of traditional mathematical statistics courses, specially for its large collection of problems and for its rigourous presentation." (Arup Bose, Sankhya: The Indian Journal of Statistics, Vol. 65 (3), 2003)</p><p>"This book is intended for an advanced postgraduate course in Mathematical Statistics, offered in a mathematically rigorous fashion. … in order to get to grips with rigorous mathematical statistics, this is an ideal book. Also, as a reference book, it is ideally suited. … Two particularly attractive features of the book are the large number of exercises at the end of each chapter – well over a hundred in each chapter, and the fact that asymptotic theory is studied throughout the book … ." (Tertius de Wet, SASJ – South African Statistical Journal, March, 2004)</p><p><br/><br/><b>Product Description</b><br/>This graduate textbook covers topics in statistical theory essential for graduate students preparing for work on a Ph.D. degree in statistics. The first chapter provides a quick overview of concepts and results in measure-theoretic probability theory that are usefulin statistics. The second chapter introduces some fundamental concepts in statistical decision theory and inference. Chapters 3-7 contain detailed studies on some important topics: unbiased estimation, parametric estimation, nonparametric estimation, hypothesis testing, and confidence sets. A large number of exercises in each chapter provide not only practice problems for students, but also many additional results. In addition to the classical results that are typically covered in a textbook of a similar level, this book introduces some topics in modern statistical theory that have been developed in recent years, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo, quasi-likelihoods, empirical likelihoods, statistical functionals, generalized estimation equations, the jackknife, and the bootstrap.</p>