Ron Doney

Ron Doney
Born
Ronald Arthur Doney
Alma materDurham University
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of Manchester
ThesisSome problems on random walks (1964)
Doctoral advisorG. E. H. Reuter

Ronald Arthur Doney is a British mathematician. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Manchester and a specialist in probability theory.[1]

Doney completed his PhD at Durham University in 1964 under the supervision of G. E. H. Reuter.[2] He worked briefly at the University of East Anglia, before joining Imperial College London as a lecturer in 1965. In 1970, he moved to the University of Manchester, where he spent the remainder of his academic career.[3]

In the mid-1970s, Doney published a series of papers on the growth properties of general branching processes, and often collaborated with Nicholas Bingham.[3] From 1977 onward, he returned primarily to the study of random walks.[3]

During the 1990s, he had a 'relatively intense' collaboration with French probabilist Jean Bertoin. This emerged from Bertoin noticing Doney’s 1991 paper on Lévy processes in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society. They eventually co-authored seven papers on conditioned random walks, six of which appeared between 1994 and 1997.[3]

Selected publications

  • Bingham, N.H.; Doney, R.A. (1974). "Asymptotic properties of supercritical branching processes I: The Galton–Watson process". Advances in Applied Probability. 6 (4): 711–731. doi:10.2307/1426188.
  • Doney, R.A. (1991). "Hitting probabilities for spectrally positive Lévy processes". Journal of the London Mathematical Society. 44 (3): 566–576. doi:10.1112/jlms/s2-44.3.566.
  • Bertoin, J.; Doney, R.A. (1994). "On conditioning a random walk to stay nonnegative" (PDF). The Annals of Probability. doi:10.1214/aop/1176988497.
  • Bertoin, J.; Doney, R.A. (1996). "Some asymptotic results for transient random walks". Advances in Applied Probability. 28 (1): 207–226. doi:10.2307/1427918.
  • Doney, R.A. (2012). "Local behaviour of first passage probabilities" (PDF). Probability Theory and Related Fields. 152: 559–588. doi:10.1007/s00440-010-0330-7.

References

  1. ^ "Academic and research staff (A-Z) - Department of Mathematics". University of Manchester. Retrieved 2 August 2025.
  2. ^ Ronald Arthur Doney (1964). Some problems on random walks (PDF) (Thesis). Durham University.
  3. ^ a b c d Chaumont, Loïc; Kyprianou, Andreas E., eds. (2021). "A Lifetime of Excursions Through Random Walks and Lévy Processes". Progress in Probability. 78: 1–4. Retrieved 1 August 2025.