Page 7 - Textos de Matemática Vol. 47

FOREWORD
This special issue of Textos de Matem´atica is dedicated to our colleague and friend Nazar´e Mendes Lopes. It includes extended versions of some of the talks presented at the Workshop on Statistics and Inference held at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Coimbra on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, and some other contributions by researchers invited to participate in this volume.
Nazar´e Mendes Lopes is one of the founding members of the Probability and Statistics group at the University of Coimbra. Following an e↵ort by the Department of Mathematics to modernize the teaching of probability and sta- tistics and to foster research activities in this field, Nazar´e Mendes Lopes found herself in close connection with the French school that was guiding these e↵orts. After her graduation in Applied Mathematics by the University of Coimbra, she undertook post-graduate studies in probability and statistics supervised by Raymond Moch´e, later leaving to Paris to work with Jean Ge↵roy to finally conclude her PhD in the very beginning of 1985 at the University of Coimbra.
Nazar´e Mendes Lopes early research interests concentrated on point pro- cesses and nonparametric methods. Shortly after this initial period, Nazar´e Mendes Lopes redirected her interests to the domain of time series. This has re- mained her main research area for which Nazar´e Mendes Lopes has contributed to the establishment of fundamental properties and the comprehension of the structure of some time series models, particularly bilinear and conditionally heteroscedastic ones.
Nazar´e Mendes Lopes teaching qualities have always been well recognised. The enthusiasm and commitment she puts in her teaching has certainly helped her e↵orts in attracting young students to probability and statistics. This enthu- siasm and seriousness are reflected in the published monographs, that evolved from classroom notes, where a particular, rather mathematical, view of the field is explained.
Finally, we would like to thank the special presence of Jean Michel Zakoian, Filipa Silva, Kamil Feridun Turkman and Maria Ivette Gomes in the workshop, the authors who contributed to this volume, the reviewers for their valuable col- laboration, the editorial board of Textos de Matema´tica, Maria Paula Oliveira, Ana Paula Santana and Ju´lio Neves, for supporting and promoting the publi- cation of this special issue, and the Centre for Mathematics of the University of Coimbra for its financial support. Without them the workshop and the pub- lication of this volume would not have been possible.
Coimbra, February 2015
The editors