Sir John Kingman, former Vice-Chancellor of the University and now Emeritus Professor in the School of Mathematics, has been awarded the Guy Medal in Gold from the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) - its top honour.

The RSS selected Sir John 'for his fundamental contributions to stochastic processes in four main areas: heavy traffic queuing theory; regenerative phenomena; subadditive ergodic theory; and mathematical population genetics'.

The citation continues: 'His work has been simultaneously fundamental to the mathematics of stochastic processes and highly influential for a wide range of application areas'.

Sir Johnis to be presented with the award at a ceremony during the RSS annual conference in Newcastle in September 2013.