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the story of Gertrud and Auguste Macé

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 6, 2020 by xi'an

The discussions about the links between early statistics and eugenism brought back to memory the tragic story of a German-Norman couple, friends of my grandparents, Gertrud(e) and Auguste Macé, whom I met in the mid 1980’s. Auguste Macé was a school friend of my grandmother, born near the harbour city of Granville, Manche and, like my grandparents,  a war orphan, son of a French conscript killed in combat during WW I. During WW II, when Nazi Germany promptly invaded France in the Spring of 1940, Auguste Macé was part of the millions of French conscripts captured by German troops and sent to a stalag, in North-Eastern Germany (Prussia), where he was made to work in farms missing their workforce conscripted to war. In one of these farms, he met Gertrud, daughter of the farm owners, they fell in love, and Gertrud eventually got pregnant. When her pregnancy was revealed, Auguste was sent to another POW camp. And, while Gertrud was able to give birth to a baby boy, she was dreadfully punished by the Nazis for it: as she had broken their racial purity laws, she was sterilised and prevented from having further children, presumably staying in her parents’ farm. At the end of WW II, Auguste was freed by Soviet troops and went searching for Gertrud. It took him around six months of traveling in the chaotic post-war Germany, but he eventually found both her and their son! They then went back to Auguste’s farm, in Normandy, where they spent the rest of their life, with further hardships like the neighbourhood hostility to a Franco-German couple, lost their young adult son in circumstances I cannot remember, and tragically ending their life together in a car accident in 1988, on a trip to Germany… [When remembering this couple, I have been searching on-line for more information about them but apart from finding the military card of Auguste’s father and Auguste’s 1988 death record by INSEE, I could not spot any link in birth or wedding certificates or in the 98 lists of WW II French POWs. Where I could not find my great-uncle, either.]

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appel du 18 juin

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2020 by xi'an

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the (forty-)seven samurai (赤穂浪士)

Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 25, 2019 by xi'an

During my vacations in Japan, I read the massive (1096p) book by Osaragi Jiro on the  Akō incident, with occidental title the 47 rōnins. Which I had bought in Paris before leaving. This is a romancized version of an historical event that took part in 1701 in the Genroku era. Where 47 rōnin (leaderless samurai) avenged the death of their former master Takumi no Kami ordered by the current Shôgun after Takumi no Kami stuck an official Kira Yoshinaka who had insulted him publicly. And were also condemned to commit sepuku. (As I suspected while reading the book, it was initially published in 1927-1928 as a series, which explains for its length.) This is a very famous story in the Japanese culture and there exist many versions in novels, plays, movies, one featuring the fabulous Toshirō Mifune (and another one commissioned by the Japanese military during WWII), and prints, including some by Hiroshige and Hokusai. Not only it is a great read, with a very classical style (in the French translation) and enough plots and subplots to deserve the 1096 pages!, but it also reflects [much more than in Yoshikawa’s Musashi] upon the transition from feudal to modern Japan, with the samurai class slowly dwindling out for the merchant class and a central administration. Which the central characters in the book mostly bemoan and hence praise the chivaleresque action of the 47 rōnins, fighting against superior forces, except for some who reflect on the uselessness of a warrior class (and go as far as assassinating random samurai). Interestingly, the conclusion of the real story, namely the suicide of the 47 rōnins, is not included in the book. Which links the head of the revenge to famous characters of the time, including a scholar anticipating the Meiji rise of Japanese nationalism by removing cultural and religious links to China, including the preeminence of Shintoism over Buddhism. The book is also the attention paid to seasons and gardens throughout, which is a feature I found in many Japanese books. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the story involves very few female central characters and, except for one spy, very passive roles.

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Berlin [and Vienna] noir [book review]

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2017 by xi'an

While in Cambridge last month, I picked a few books from a local bookstore as fodder for my incoming vacations. Including this omnibus volume made of the first three books by Philip Kerr featuring Bernie Gunther, a private and Reich detective in Nazi Germany, namely, March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), and A German Requiem (1991). (Book that I actually read before the vacations!) The stories take place before the war, in 1938, and right after, in 1946, in Berlin and Vienna. The books centre on a German version of Philip Marlowe, wise cracks included, with various degrees of success. (There actually is a silly comparison with Chandler on the back of the book! And I found somewhere else a similarly inappropriate comparison with Graham Greene‘s The Third Man…) Although I read the whole three books in a single week, which clearly shows some undeniable addictive quality in the plots, I find those plots somewhat shallow and contrived, especially the second one revolving around a serial killer of young girls that aims at blaming Jews for those crimes and at justifying further Nazi persecutions. Or the time spent in Dachau by Bernie Gunther as undercover agent for Heydrich. If anything, the third volume taking place in post-war Berlin and Wien is much better at recreating the murky atmosphere of those cities under Allied occupations. But overall there is much too much info-dump passages in those novels to make them a good read. The author has clearly done his documentation job correctly, from the early homosexual persecutions to Kristallnacht, to the fights for control between the occupying forces, but the information about the historical context is not always delivered in the most fluent way. And having the main character working under Heydrich, then joining the SS, does make relating to him rather unlikely, to say the least. It is hence unclear to me why those books are so popular, apart from the easy marketing line that stories involving Nazis are more likely to sell… Nothing to be compared with the fantastic Alone in Berlin, depicting the somewhat senseless resistance of a Berliner during the Nazi years, dropping hand-written messages against the regime under strangers’ doors.

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Turing’s Bayesian contributions

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Running, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2015 by xi'an

Following The Imitation Game, this recent movie about Alan Turing played by Benedict “Sherlock” Cumberbatch, been aired in French theatres, one of my colleagues in Dauphine asked me about the Bayesian contributions of Turing. I first tried to check in Sharon McGrayne‘s book, but realised it had vanished from my bookshelves, presumably lent to someone a while ago. (Please return it at your earliest convenience!) So I told him about the Bayesian principle of updating priors with data and prior probabilities with likelihood evidence in code detecting algorithms and ultimately machines at Bletchley Park… I could not got much farther than that and hence went checking on Internet for more fodder.

“Turing was one of the independent inventors of sequential analysis for which he naturally made use of the logarithm of the Bayes factor.” (p.393)

I came upon a few interesting entries but the most amazìng one was a 1979 note by I.J. Good (assistant of Turing during the War) published in Biometrika retracing the contributions of Alan Mathison Turing during the War. From those few pages, it emerges that Turing’s statistical ideas revolved around the Bayes factor that Turing used “without the qualification `Bayes’.” (p.393) He also introduced the notion of ban as a unit for the weight of evidence, in connection with the town of Banbury (UK) where specially formatted sheets of papers were printed “for carrying out an important classified process called Banburismus” (p.394). Which shows that even in 1979, Good did not dare to get into the details of Turing’s work during the War… And explains why he was testing simple statistical hypothesis against simple statistical hypothesis. Good also credits Turing for the expected weight of evidence, which is another name for the Kullback-Leibler divergence and for Shannon’s information, whom Turing would visit in the U.S. after the War. In the final sections of the note, Turing is also associated with Gini’s index, the estimation of the number of species (processed by Good from Turing’s suggestion in a 1953 Biometrika paper, that is, prior to Turing’s suicide. In fact, Good states in this paper that “a very large part of the credit for the present paper should be given to [Turing]”, p.237), and empirical Bayes.

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