John Edmund Kerrich

John Edmund Kerrich (born May 9, 1903 in Norfolk , England , † 1985 in South Africa ) was a South African mathematician of English descent. During his internment in a Danish camp during World War II , he logged thousands of random experiments .

Life

John Edmund Kerrich was born in England but emigrated already in 1904 with his parents to South Africa and joined in Euton Estate , a wealthy suburb of Johannesburg , the St. John's College from.

In 1922 he began studying mathematics and astronomy at the newly founded University of Witwatersrand , which he completed in 1929 as an M.Sc. completed. He remained as a lecturer ( lecturer ) and from 1935 as a senior lecturer at the university. In 1934 he married Sigrid Bech-Bruun, with whom he had two sons.

In April 1940 he was arrested while visiting Copenhagen and interned in the Danish camp Hald Ege near Viborg . The camp, a former public sanatorium of the Danish Red Cross, had previously served as an internment camp for German soldiers and was disbanded when Denmark was liberated in May 1945.

After his release in 1945, Kerrich returned to the Mathematics Department of the University of Witwatersrand as a Senior Lecturer in Charge , was one of the 13 founders of the South African Statistical Association in 1953 (and subsequently its President three times) and in 1957 became a founding professor of the Department of Statistics at his university. He held this post until his retirement in 1971.

plant

Kerrich was best known for his An Experimental Introduction to the Theory of Probability . It contains the results of several thousand random experiments that he carried out together with Erich Christensen during his internment in Denmark. Kerrich and Christensen completed 10,000 coin flips and noted the results in order to provide an empirical basis for the law of large numbers formulated by Jakob I Bernoulli (they scored 502 heads after 1,000 tosses, 2,533 times after 5,000 tosses and 5,067 times after 10,000 tosses) . With table tennis balls they also drew 5,000 balls from an urn with two red and two green balls (they received 756 red / red, 1,689 red / green, 1,688 green / red and 867 green / green). The work was designed as a teaching text and is also used in modern statistics textbooks.

The book was written in 1941 and printed in Copenhagen in 1946. In the foreword, Kerrich expressly thanks the Danish authorities who gave him protection and good treatment and prevented internment in Germany (“The writer has great pleasure in thanking the Danish authorities for the measure of protection they were able to afford him, and in congratulating them on the truly admirable manner in which they cared for their internees for so many years. ").

In addition to the experimental introduction , there is only one other monograph by Kerrich, his inaugural lecture at the Department of Statistics , to be verified, although he is the author or co-author of 57 monographs and numerous journal articles.

Fonts

• John Edmund Kerrich: An experimental introduction to the theory of probability . Einar Munksgaard, Copenhagen 1946 (Reprint: Belgisk Import Co., Copenhagen 1950 and Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg 1964)
• John Edmund Kerrich: Statistics as an aid to science: inaugural lecture . Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg 1958

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} dedication text in the South African Statistical Journal , Vol. 7, Issue 2, Jan. 1973, available online
2. ^ Valdemar Andersen: Hald Hovedgård . Herning: Poul Kristensens Forlag, 1977
3. ↑ The Department of Statistics at the University of the Witwatersrand: A Brief History ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2014 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.  
4. ^ D. Freedman, R. Pisani & R. Purves: Statistics . 4th ed .; New York: WW Norton, 2007