George Marsaglia

George Marsaglia (born March 12, 1924 in Denver , † February 15, 2011 in Tallahassee ) was an American mathematician and computer scientist .

Life

Marsaglia attended Clayton College in Denver, an orphan school, was with the Army Air Forces and then studied physics at Colorado State University with a bachelor's degree and at Ohio State University mathematics with a master's degree and doctorate with Henry Mann in 1951 (Stochastic processes and classes of random variables). He was then a Fulbright scholar at the University of Manchester with Alan Turing . Marsaglia taught at the University of Montana , was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Rangoon in Burma , taught at Oklahoma State University and the University of North Carolina, and was with Westinghouse and a research mathematician with Boeing in Seattle . During this time he was an adjunct professor at the University of Washington . He then worked at McGill University in Montreal as head of the computer science department and then in the same function at Washington State University . From 1985 he was at Florida State University (Supercomputer Computations Research Institute and Department of Statistics). He retired in 1996 and was Professor Emeritus at both Washington State University and Florida State University.

Marsaglia dealt intensively with the generation and testing of random numbers, for example with application in cryptology , and showed the inadequacies of older methods. He developed the Polar method for generating normally distributed random numbers. In 1968 he set up the Marsaglia theorem named after him , which deals with certain properties of linear congruence generators . Marsaglia developed a series of tests for random number generators, which he published on CD in 1995 (so-called Diehard tests ).

In addition to Europe and the USA and Canada, he was visiting professor and researcher in Tashkent, Mexico, Madras, Hong Kong and Beijing.

He was married and had a son. As a hobby he dealt with golf, electronics and various crafts.

Fonts

• Random numbers fall mainly in the planes . In: Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. , Volume 61, 1968, 25, pnas.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ George Marsaglia. Information from the Social Security Death Index .
2. ^ Death Notice: George Marsaglia (1924-2011) . In: Tallahassee Democrat . February 22, 2011 ( legacy.com ).
3. ↑ George Marsaglia in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
4. ↑ Marsaglia Random Number CD ROM, Florida State University ( Memento of the original from January 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.