Archive for Richard von Mises

Randomness [French version]

Posted in Books, University life with tags , , , , on June 25, 2011 by xi'an

As a (weak) coincidence (with my review of Randomness through Computation), the French Mathematical Society chose the theme of its yearly meeting (on June 17-18 at CIRM) as “Qu’est ce qu’un nombre au hasard ?” with talks by

The talk by David Xiao is accompanied by a fairly interesting survey that goes much farther than what is found in Randomness through Computation. The same applies to the talk by Laurent Bienvenu, with a survey that is closer in spirit to the themes of Randomness through Computation (Kolmogorov and Chaitin complexities, Martin-Löf randomness).

Another (weak) coincidence is that I received yesterday in the mail Richard von Mises’ Probability, Statistics and Truth, which I hope to read carefully in the coming weeks, in connection with the above, but also Bayesian statistics (“a misundertsanding of one of the classical formulas of probability calculus”).

von Mises lecture im Berlin

Posted in Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , on June 3, 2011 by xi'an

In about a month I will give a talk in Berlin on ABC. This is actually a special lecture held annually in honour of Richard von Mises who was professor in Berlin till 1933 when he had to flee Germany. Previous speakers include James A. Sethian, Albert Shiryaev, Uwe Küchler, Enrique Zuazua, and Philip Protter who gave the first von Mises lecture in 2007. I am thus quite honoured to be invited to deliver this lecture as a statistician, even though I fear my lecture and my research are fairly disjoint from Richard von Mises’ contributions to the field… (The closest I came to his work was when reviewing Krzysztof Burdzy’s The Search for Certainty own criticism of von Mises’ [and de Finetti’s] approaches to the definition of probability, only to discover von Mises had not made a lasting impact on the field of statistics in this very specific respect… However, Professor Shirayev’s talk relates to von Mises’s infinite random sequences in connection with both the formalisation of probability and algorithmic theory.)