Biographical Notes
Biographical Notes |
|
Bayes was a non-conformist minister in England. A version of what is now known as Bayes’ theorem was used in his paper "Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances," published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1764.
James Bernoulli was the first of the famous Bernoulli family of Swiss mathematicians. He wrote one of the early books devoted to probability, Ars Conjectandi, which was published after his death in 1713. Bernoulli formulated the version of the law of large numbers for independent trials, now called Bernoulli trials, and studied the binomial distribution.
Buffon was the director of the Paris Jardin du Roi and was best known during his time for his thirty-six volume work on natural history. Buffon's famous coin and needle problems are considered to be among the first problems in geometric probability.
Cardano, who lived in Italy, was a man of many interests: law, medicine, astrology, gambling, and mathematics. His book Liber de Ludo Aleae (The Book on Games of Chance), published after his death in 1663, contained perhaps the first mathematical analysis of gambling.
The French mathematician and scientist Cauchy contributed to just about every branch of mathematics, including probability. However, he is perhaps best known for his fundamental contibutions in real and complex analysis.
The Russian mathematician Chebyshev established the inequality that gives an upper bound on the probability of a large deviation from the mean.
Fisher was one of the most important statisticians of the 20th century. Many of his most important contributions were developed while he at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in England, including work in the analysis of variance, hypothesis testing, maximum likelihood methods, and the design of experiments. In 1933 Fisher became the Galton professor of Eugenics at University College in London.
Francis Galton was a British meteorologist, biologist, and statistician, and the cousin of Charles Darwin. The pinball device with the triangular array of pegs was described in his book Natural Inheritance, published in 1889. He called the device a quincunx, but it is now known as the Galton board.
Gosset was a British chemist and statistician who worked for the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. He is best known for his study of the probability distribution now known as the t distribution. Because the brewery did allow publication by employees, Gosset published his work on the t distribution in 1908 under the pseudonym "Student."
After dropping out of medical school, Monty Hall worked as an announcer for boxing, wrestling, soccer, hockey, and bingo games before finding his true calling as the host of Let’s Make a Deal.
Jensen was self-taught Danish mathematician who worked for the telephone company. Although best known for the inequality that bears his name, Jensen also worked on the Riemann hypothesis and Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Laplace was a French mathematician, scientist, and statesman. He wrote one of the early books on probability, Theorie Analytique des Probabilites, in 1812. One of his contributions was an improvement on the normal approximation to the binomial distribution, that had been derived by De Moivre.
The Russian mathematician Markov is best known for his study of a class of random processes now known as Markov chains. A Markov chain is characterized by the property that, at any time, the future behavior of the process is independent of the past behavior, given the present state. Markov was a student of Chebyshev.
De Mere was a professional gambler who supposedly posed his famous dice problem to Pascal in 1654. However, the problem actually dates back a century earlier to Cardano.
The French mathematician De Moivre made many important early contributions to the theory of probability. He published The Doctrine of Chances in 1718. In 1733, he derived the normal approximation to the binomial distribution, the earliest version of the central limit theorem.
Montmort was a French mathematician whose interest in probability brought him in contact with De Moivre and with John and Nicolas Bernoulli. The resulting correspondence greatly stimulated the early development of probability. Montmort wrote Essay d’ Analyse sur les Jeux de Hazard (Analytical Essay on Games of Chance), published in 1708.
De Morgan was a British mathematician who made fundamental contributions to algebra and logic. He was very fond of mathematical puzzles and paradoxes; his book, A Budget of Paradoxes, is still widely read. De Morgan is best known for the general principle of duality in set theory and logic.
Newton was a mathematician, scientist, and philosopher and is best known for the theory of universal gravitation and for the invention of the calculus. However, he contributed to the early development of probability as well.
Pascal was a French philosopher and mathematician and is considered one of the fathers of the mathematical theory of probability. He studied the triangular array of binomial coefficients that bears his name.
Pepys was an English civil servant who rose to the rank of secretary of the admiralty, but is now best known for his diary. He corresponded with Newton on the dice problem that now bears his name.
Poisson was a French mathematician and scientist who made contributions in analysis, electricity, magnetism, and astronomy. Poisson found the limiting form of the binomial distribution that is now named after him. He wrote Recherches sur la probabilite des jugements, published in 1837.
Marilyn Vos Savant has been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame for her IQ score of 228. She is the author of the popular column "Ask Marilyn" in Parade magazine. To students of probability, she is best known for her analysis of the Monty Hall problem.
Resource Lists |
  |