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The Legend of Abraham Wald
- qrian 4y agoFew weeks of intense reading to understand a whole semester's worth of mathematics... I'd also like to have that skill. Perhaps being homeschooled helped acquire such skill.
- jbullock35 4y agoThe article covers so much -- and it doesn't even mention the "Wald estimator," which is part of the foundation of the modern (causal-inference-oriented) view of the method of instrumental variables.
- smcin 4y ago...died in 1950 aged 48 in a plane crash on an Indian lecture tour. Add to other mathematicians who would have been even more prominent if they hadn't died before their time: Galois, Ramanujan, Turing...
- heintje_ghulam 4y agoHe made major contributions to statistics. The Wald test in statistics is named after him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wald_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wald_test). I think he was also a forerunner of decision theory and invented an early form of the minimax principle: Wald, A. (1939). Contributions to the theory of statistical estimation and testing hypotheses. The Annals of Mathematics, 10(4), 299-326.
- hackandthink 4y ago(when following Wald's work on rearranging series) This is a nice riddle: Is summing the series: 1, -1, 1, 1,.... 0 = (1-1)+(1-1)+(1-1)....=0+0+0... or 1 = 1+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+(-1+1)....=1+0+0+0...