Fundamentals of Geostatistics in Five Lessons

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Short Courses in Geology Series, Volume 8.

From its inception as a separate discipline, geostatistics sought recognition from practitioners, not from mathematicians or physicists, and rightfully so. Indeed, the theory was essentially established by the 1950's by Kolmogorov and Wiener and exposed by Matern (1960), Whittle (1963), and Mat heron (1965), among others. But there is a long, hard way between a concept expressed by matrix notations in a Hilbert space and its implementation and routine application. It is my opinion that the main contribution of geostatistics has been and still is implementation, an essential follow-up step much too often forsaken by theoreticians.