The Centre for Mathematical Statistics (the Centre, for short, in what follows) was founded on 1st April 1964 as a research institute of the Romanian Academy. Its basic nucleus was the probability division of the Institute of Mathematics, which had been founded in 1949 as a unit of the same learned society. The promoter of this development was Professor Gheorghe Mihoc (1906-1981), who became the CentreпїЅs first director, and after whom the Centre has been named since 1997. MihocпїЅs motivation was a visionary understanding of the part that probability and statistics would play in the not very distant future, rather than the considerable expansion of these fields at the time. The appearance of the Centre also constituted a revival, at a different level, of the Institute of Statistics, Actuarial Science and Computation of Bucharest University, which developed in 1941 from the School of Statistics founded in 1931 by Professor Octav Onicescu (1892-1983). This institute, dismantled in 1947, was one of the first centres of postgraduate studies in statistics in the world.