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Leonard Jimmie Savage Quotes

Leonard Jimmie Savage was an American mathematician and statistician. Economist Milton Friedman said Savage was "one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius."He graduated from the University of Michigan and later worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Yale University, and the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University. Though his thesis advisor was Sumner Myers, he also credited Milton Friedman and W. Allen Wallis as statistical mentors.

His most noted work was the 1954 book The Foundations of Statistics, in which he put forward a theory of subjective and personal probability and statistics which forms one of the strands underlying Bayesian statistics and has applications to game theory.

During World War II, Savage served as chief "statistical" assistant to John von Neumann, the mathematician credited with describing the principles upon which electronic computers should be based. Later he was one the participants to the Macy conferences on cybernetics.One of Savage's indirect contributions was his discovery of the work of Louis Bachelier on stochastic models for asset prices and the mathematical theory of option pricing. Savage brought the work of Bachelier to the attention of Paul Samuelson. It was from Samuelson's subsequent writing that "random walk" became fundamental to mathematical finance.

In 1951 he introduced the minimax regret criterion used in decision theory.

The Hewitt–Savage zero–one law is named after him, as is the Friedman–Savage utility function. Wikipedia  

✵ 20. November 1917 – 1. November 1971
Leonard Jimmie Savage: 3 quotes0 likes

Famous Leonard Jimmie Savage Quotes

“[The George E. P. Box paper Fitting empirical data (1960) is] a mature exposition of an important branch of statistics, to which the author has made great contributions. One feature of particular interest is practical discussion of genuinely nonlinear fitting problems and their solution with the help of tact and a special, publicly available, IBM-704 program. Another is insightful comments on the role of prior distributions in statistics.”

Leonard Jimmie Savage

Leonard Jimmie Savage in 1960s; cited in: JOC/EFR (2006) " George Edward Pelham Box http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Box.html" at history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk, Nov 2006.

“My dissertation for the Ph. D. degree at the University of Michigan was on applications of vectorial methods to metric geometry (in the sense of the Menger school), especially with a view to the merging of metric geometry in that sense with differential geometry. Professor S B Myers at the University of Michigan sponsored my dissertation, but I was particularly close to R L Wilder there.”

Leonard Jimmie Savage

Leonard Jimmie Savage, cited in: W.A. Wallis, "Leonard Jimmie Savage 1917-1971," in E Shils (ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago: teachers, scientists, and scholars. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991), 436-451; Quoted in: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, " Leonard Jimmie Savage http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Savage.html," at history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk, November 2010.

“For a person who wants to do original, realistic, and critical work in statistics there is no atmosphere anywhere in the world today to compare with this Department.”

Leonard Jimmie Savage

Leonard Jimmie Savage, (1960) cited in: W.A. Wallis, "Leonard Jimmie Savage 1917-1971," in E Shils (ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago: teachers, scientists, and scholars. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991), 436-451; Quoted in: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson (2010).
Letter to Chicago Department before taking up a professorship at the University of Michigan.

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