William Feller

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William (Vilim) Feller , called Willy Feller, (born July 7, 1906 in Zagreb , † January 14, 1970 in New York City ) was a Croatian - American mathematician with special merits in the field of probability theory .

Feller began his mathematics studies at the University of Zagreb , which he continued in 1925 in Göttingen , where he studied with David Hilbert and Richard Courant and received his doctorate in 1926 with Courant. In 1928 he took a job as a lecturer at the University of Kiel , but fled because of his Jewish origin in 1933 before the Nazis from Germany. After working in Copenhagen (with Harald Bohr ) and Stockholm (with Harald Cramér ), he came to the USA in 1939 with his wife Clara Mary Nielsen, whom he had married in 1938 , and became a citizen in 1944. He first went to Brown University in 1939 and in 1944 (as a colleague of Mark Kac ) to Columbia University . In 1950 he was appointed to Princeton University .

Feller published many papers on various subjects in mathematics. Several theorems from the field of probability theory bear his name. He was also a member of the Royal Statistical Society and President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics . Feller and Otto Neugebauer published the Zentralblatt für Mathematik from 1934 to 1938 , which both of them relocated to Copenhagen in 1934. In 1939 he was with Neugebauer, who also went to Brown University, one of the founding fathers of Mathematical Reviews and its first editor-in-chief.

His main work is the two-volume textbook "An introduction to probability theory and its applications", which is still cited today and is one of the best mathematical textbooks of the 20th century.

Signature of Feller

Feller was a member of the US Academy of Arts and Sciences (1958), the National Academy of Sciences (1960) and the American Philosophical Society (1966). In 1959 he received the National Medal of Science . In 1950 he gave an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ( Some recent trends in the mathematical theory of diffusion ) and in 1958 a plenary lecture at the ICM in Edinburgh ( Some new connections between probability and classical analysis ).

Works

  • An introduction to probability theory and its applications . Volume 1: Wiley, New York 1950, ISBN 0-471-25708-7 , Volume 2: Wiley, New York 1966, ISBN 0-471-25709-5 .
  • Selected Papers , 2 volumes, Springer 2015 (Eds. René Schilling, Zoran Vondracek, Wojbor Woyczynski)

Statements and objects named after him

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Feller, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Feller, Vilim; Feller, Willy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH July 7, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Zagreb
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1970
Place of death New York City