---
title: "Sutton Monro"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Sutton Monro"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-15T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["stochastic approximation","stochastic gradient descent","Herbert Robbins","history-of-ml","statistics"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Statistician who, with Herbert Robbins, published "A Stochastic Approximation Method" in 1951 (*Annals of Mathematical Statistics*), the paper that introduced stochastic approximation — a method for making successive noisy experiments converge in probability toward an unknown target. Matters to this vault as co-author of the statistical root that both [[entity-shunichi-amari|Amari's]] stochastic descent method and the Widrow–Hoff LMS rule descend from, on the SGD family tree the vault maps around [[moc-backpropagation-origins]].

## References
- 2026-07-07: co-authored the 1951 paper founding stochastic approximation, read directly at the primary. ([[claim-robbins-monro-1951-stochastic-approximation]])