Patrick Billingsley

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Patrick Paul "Pat" Billingsley (born May 3, 1925 in Sioux Falls , South Dakota , † April 22, 2011 in Chicago , Illinois ) was an American actor and mathematician who dealt with probability theory.

Patrick Billingsley in New Orleans (1961)

Life

Billingsley grew up in the Sioux Falls countryside, the son of a doctor. He studied at the United States Naval Academy as an engineer (Bachelor 1948) and was an officer in the United States Navy until 1957 . He was stationed in Japan, among other places, where he earned a black belt in judo. In addition, Billingsley studied mathematics at Princeton University , where he completed his master's degree in 1952 and received his doctorate in 1955 under William Feller ( The invariance principle for dependent random variables , Transactions American Mathematical Society, vol. 83, 1956, p. 250). 1957/58 he was a Fellow of the National Science Foundation in Princeton. In 1958 he became an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Chicago , where he remained for the remainder of his career as a mathematician, from 1963 onwards with a full professorship in mathematics and statistics. 1980 to 1983 he was head of the faculty of statistics and in 1994 he retired. He was visiting professor in Great Britain, India, Sweden and Italy, among others.

Billingsley was editor of the Annals of Probability from 1976 to 1979. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in Copenhagen (1964/65) and as a Guggenheim Fellow 1972/72 visiting professor at the University of Cambridge .

As early as 1960, Billingsley was concerned with the Hausdorff dimension in probability theory, but also with the application of limit theorems of probability theory in number theory. In 1974 he received the Lester Randolph Ford Award for his essay Prime numbers and Brownian motion . Billingsley was a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics , of which he was president in 1983, and, since 1986, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . At times he also worked as a cryptanalyst for the National Security Agency .

In addition to his career as a mathematician, he was also an actor. He first played from 1966 at the Court Theater of the University of Chicago and at the Body Politic Theater, where he was often seen in leading roles in the 1970s and 1980s. This also led to supporting roles in films, first in 1977 in Teufelskreis Alpha ( The Fury ) by Brian De Palma and z. B. in Die Unbrechlichen 1987 also by De Palma. He also played teachers (in My Bodyguard , Die Schulfhofratten von Chicago 1980 by Tony Bill ) and professors ( Somewhere in time , Ein födlicher Traum von Jeannot Szwarc 1980) and saw in an interview in 1978 that his teaching activities were directly related to acting.

He was married to social activist Ruth Billingsley until her death in 2000 and had four daughters and a son. Billingsley died on April 22, 2011 after a brief serious illness in his apartment in Chicago 's Hyde Park district .

Fonts

  • Ergodic theory and information, Wiley 1965, Krieger 1978
  • Probability and Measure, Wiley 1979, 3rd edition 1995, ISBN 0-471-00710-2 (also translated into Polish)
  • Convergence of probability measures, Wiley 1968, 1999
  • with Collin J. Watson a. a .: Statistics for Management and Economics, Boston, Allyn and Bacon 1990
  • with David L. Huntsberger: Elements of Statistical Inference, Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 1973, 1981, 1987
  • Statistical inference for Markov Processes, University of Chicago Press 1961
  • Weak convergence of measures - applications in probability, 1971, SIAM
  • Billingsley "Prime Numbers and Brownian Motion", American Mathematical Monthly 1973

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Billingsley, On the central limit theorem for the prime divisor function, American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 76, 1969, pp. 132-139, Prime numbers and Brownian motion, American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 80, 1973, p. 1099, The probability theory of additive arithmetic functions, Annals of Probability Vol. 2, 1974, p. 749, article "Probabilistic Number Theory" in the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica 1974
  2. ↑ U. of C. math statistician and respected stage actor - obituary by Maureen O´Donnell ( Memento of the original from April 7, 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.suntimes.com
  3. ↑ When you teach, you perform in the front of an audience. That's much like acting. As a teacher you're used to being on stage . Chicago Tribune 1978. Obituary at the University of Chicago.
  4. ↑ Patrick Billingsley, probability theorist and actor, 1925–2011 , accessed May 17, 2011 (English)
personal data
SURNAME Billingsley, Patrick
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Billingsley, Patrick Paul (full name); Billingsley, Pat
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actor and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Sioux Falls , South Dakota
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 2011
Place of death Chicago , Illinois