Irénée-Jules Bienaymé

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Irénée-Jules Bienaymé (born August 28, 1796 in Paris , † October 19, 1878 ibid) was a French probability theorist and statistician. In continuation of the work of Laplace , whose least squares method he generalized, he made contributions to probability theory , statistics and their application to financial accounting, demography and social statistics. In particular, he pronounced the Chebyshev inequality with regard to the law of large numbers (1869).

Irénée-Jules Bienaymé

Life

With Bienaymé the series of the great French probability theorists comes to an end, which begins with Pascal and Fermat and leads to Laplace and Poisson . After him you have to look to England and Russia at the end of the 19th century to see the progress of the subject.

Despite his numerous contributions, Bienaymé is only a pale reflection of his predecessors. His private life was marked by a series of blows of fate. He attended the Lyceum of Bruges, then the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and after he was involved in the defense of Paris in 1814, he attended the École polytechnique in 1815 , but as one of the class that was due to his Bonapartist sympathies of Louis XVIII. was excluded from the university.

In 1818 he became a lecturer in mathematics at the Saint-Cyr Military School , but entered the financial administration two years later. Quickly promoted to finance inspector and in 1834 to general finance inspector, the republic dismissed him in 1848 for lack of republican sentiments. After he became professor for probability theory at the Sorbonne , he lost his position in 1851. Subsequently, he worked as a consultant and became a statistical expert for the government of Napoleon III .

After entering the Académie des sciences in 1852, Bienaymé was for 23 years examiner for the award of statistics. As a founding member of the Société mathématique de France , he was its president in 1875. In December 1874 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg .

plant

Bienaymé published only 23 articles, half of which were published in obscure circumstances. His first work dealt with demographics and life tables. In particular, he researched the extinction of closed family groups (such as that of the high nobility), which were in decline, although the population of France as a whole grew.

As a student of Laplace and under the influence of his Analytical Theory of Probabilities (1812), he defended his views in a dispute with Poisson over the size of the jury box and the majority required for a conviction. He generalized the least squares method and found Bienaymé's equation .

Together with his friend Antoine Augustin Cournot, he tried to develop a probability theory that no longer lived from the great breath of its predecessors. After the hopes for a probabilistic description of nature by means of some universal laws, such as those still cherished by Jakob I Bernoulli , Laplace and Poisson , the magic was now gone:

“The limitless variety that nature produces in order to produce very complex effects in the simplest possible way suggests that one will discover special sentences that will apply to some special cases. However, it does not appear that a formula similar to Jakob Bernoulli's could cover all possible circumstances. "

As the French translator of the work of his friend, the Russian mathematician Pafnuti Lwowitsch Chebyshev , he published the Chebyshev inequality , which provides a simple and exact proof of the law of large numbers.

He also exchanged letters with the pioneer of demography Quételet and was in contact with Lamé .

The always contentious Bienaymé criticized Poisson's law of large numbers and had a dispute with Cauchy .

Fonts

literature

  • Christopher C. Heyde, Eugene Seneta: IJ Bienaymé. Statistical Theory Anticipated (= Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. 3). Springer, New York NY et al. 1977, ISBN 0-387-90261-9 .
  • Irenée-Jules Bienaymé, 1796–1878. Actes de la journeé organized le 21 juin 1996 (= Cahiers du Center d'Analyse et de Mathématiques Sociales. 138 = Histoire du Calcul des Probabilités et de la Statistique. 28). Center d'Analyse et de Mathématique Sociales, Paris 1997.
  • Christopher C. Heyde, Eugene Seneta: Bienaymé, Irénée-Jules . In: Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.): Dictionary of Scientific Biography . tape 15 , Supplement I: Roger Adams - Ludwik Zejszner and Topical Essays . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1978, p. 30-33 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724: Bienaymé, Irénée-Jules. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed September 20, 2019 (Russian).
personal data
SURNAME Bienaymé, Irénée-Jules
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French probability theorist and statistician
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1796
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1878
Place of death Paris