My Idols (part 3)

I guess everyone should be quite familiar with the diagram in the picture above... The Venn Diagram. John Venn, happens to be another idol of mine.

Look at this:

In 1872, John Venn, the British philosopher, had proposed a formulation of mathematical probability that would make sense in real life. He turned a major theorem of probability on its head. This is the law of large numbers, which says that if some event has a given probability and if we run identical trials over and over again, the proportion of times that event occurs will get closer and closer to the probability.

I guess it's the cross-discipline works done by those people that truely inspired me. Pearsons and their contribution to biology, Fisher (of course I think his personality is really nasty), Keynes in economics and probability and etc... Doing a double major in economics and statistics definitely gave me some advantage in both areas; but at the same time, it is hard not to be humiliated by the work done by the pioneers in both areas.

Anyway, I think John Venn looks more like a philosopher than a statistician... =)

Labels: Sexy Stats

posted by panda xuan @ 8:02 PM