Following the death of the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck in 2014, his former maths department at the University of Montpellier decided to digitise in very high resolution the 28,000 pages of notes he had left to the department. Under the supervision of Jean-Michel Marin, Head of the said department! However, thanks to the French laws governing succession, those notes cannot be posted on-line without the authorisation of the five children of Grothendieck, who keep a moral right on those notes, even though they were given to the department. Grothendieck’s children want to recover all their father’s notes—which amount to more than 90,000 handwritten pages—presumably towards a bulk sale to a prestigious American university, but the succession is in limbo while the monetary value of those notes is not ascertained. And the digitised notes are stuck in this legal no man’s land as well. It is fairly ironical that those notes are at the centre of a financial conundrum, when Grothendieck’s anarchist principles led him to refuse awards and positions and to lead a recluse and frugal life in an isolated mountain village. And to prohibit the publication of those notes… Jean-Michel remains confident though that a solution can soon be reached between Grothendieck’s children, the University, the IHES, and the French National Library. I hope those notes can be made public, so that anyone could consult them. In paper or digitised format. Even though most of these pages may just be unexploitable. But at least they will be available rather than stuck in a storage for another 25 years.
Archive for Jean-Michel Marin
The Grothendieck papers
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, University life with tags Alexandre Grothendieck, Bibliothèque Nationale, BNF, IHES, Jean-Michel Marin, Lassere, Montpellier, national treasure, succession on December 28, 2016 by xi'anBayesian Essentials with R [book review]
Posted in Books, R, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian Core, Bayesian Essentials with R, book review, Jean-Michel Marin, Kent State University, R, Technometrics, time series on July 28, 2016 by xi'an[A review of Bayesian Essentials that appeared in Technometrics two weeks ago, with the first author being rechristened Jean-Michael!]
“Overall this book is a very helpful and useful introduction to Bayesian methods of data analysis. I found the use of R, the code in the book, and the companion R package, bayess, to be helpful to those who want to begin using Bayesian methods in data analysis. One topic that I would like to see added is the use of Bayesian methods in change point problems, a topic that we found useful in a recent article and which could be added to the time series chapter. Overall this is a solid book and well worth considering by its intended audience.”
David E. BOOTH
Kent State University
amazing Gibbs sampler
Posted in Books, pictures, R, Statistics, University life with tags bayesm, convergence assessment, Gibbs sampler, Jean-Michel Marin, Markov chain Monte Carlo, mixtures, R on February 19, 2015 by xi'an
When playing with Peter Rossi’s bayesm R package during a visit of Jean-Michel Marin to Paris, last week, we came up with the above Gibbs outcome. The setting is a Gaussian mixture model with three components in dimension 5 and the prior distributions are standard conjugate. In this case, with 500 observations and 5000 Gibbs iterations, the Markov chain (for one component of one mean of the mixture) has two highly distinct regimes: one that revolves around the true value of the parameter, 2.5, and one that explores a much broader area (which is associated with a much smaller value of the component weight). What we found amazing is the Gibbs ability to entertain both regimes, simultaneously.
Bayesian essentials with R available on amazon
Posted in Books, R, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian Core, Bayesian Essentials with R, e-book, Jean-Michel Marin, R, Springer-Verlag on November 14, 2013 by xi'an
Bayesian Essentials with R is now available both as an e-book and as a hardcover book on amazon.com!
essential cover!
Posted in Books, R, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian Core, Bayesian Essentials with R, bayess, Christmas, Jean-Michel Marin, Springer-Verlag on October 23, 2013 by xi'an
Our book is nearly out..! The Springer webpage is ready, we have sent the proofs back, amazon is missing has now included the above picture, things are moving towards the publication date, supposed to be November 30. Just in time for Christmas! And not too early given that we packed off in early February…
