Herman Chernoff

Herman Chernoff (born July 1, 1923 in New York ) is an American mathematician. He has made several fundamental contributions to his main field of work, statistics . The Chernoff inequality and the Chernoff information are named after him.

Life

Chernoff received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics with a minor in physics from City College of New York in 1943 . He then worked as a physicist in the US Navy . In 1946 he began his Ph.D. Thesis (PhD) in applied mathematics from Brown University and completed it at Columbia University . From 1948 he studied at the University of Chicago and from 1951 he studied at Stanford University . In 1974 he moved to MIT , where he founded a statistics center and in 1985 to the Department of Statistics at Harvard University . Herman Chernoff married in 1947 and has two daughters.

He was President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974) and the National Academy of Sciences . He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society . On the occasion of his 60th birthday, the work " Recent Advances in Statistics " was published in his honor .

Chernoff faces

He is also the inventor of the Chernoff faces , which are used to summarize various data about faces . The data presented in face shape can e.g. B. in contrast to tables of numbers, can be recorded and processed much faster by people. The cause lies in the usually well-developed ability in humans to recognize tiny details and differences in facial features ( facial expressions ).

Fonts

With Lincoln E. Moses: Elementary decision theory , Wiley New York, 1967.
Sequential analysis and optimal design , Soc. for Industrial and Applied Math., Philadelphia, 1972.

Web links

Individual evidence

^ Herman Chernoff: The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space Graphically . In: Journal of the American Statistical Association . tape 68 , no. 342 , June 1973, p. 361-368 , doi : 10.1080 / 01621459.1973.10482434 , JSTOR : 2284077 .

personal data
SURNAME	Chernoff, Herman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	July 1, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH	new York

[1] Herman Chernoff: The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space Graphically . In: Journal of the American Statistical Association . tape 68 , no. 342 , June 1973, p. 361-368 , doi : 10.1080 / 01621459.1973.10482434 , JSTOR : 2284077 .