- Leonard Jimmie Savage
Leonard Jimmie Savage (
20 November 1917 –1 November 1971 ) was a USmathematician and statistician.He graduated from the
University of Michigan and later worked at theInstitute for Advanced Study inPrinceton, New Jersey , theUniversity of Chicago , theUniversity of Michigan ,Yale University , and theStatistical Research Group atColumbia University . Though his thesis advisor was Sumner Myers, he also creditedMilton Friedman andW. Allen Wallis as statistical mentors.His most noted work was the 1954 book "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 togame theory .During World War II, Savage served as chief "statistical" assistant to
John von Neumann , the mathematician credited with building the first electronic computer. [ cite book | last=Hacking | first=Ian | authorlink=Ian Hacking | year=2001 | title=An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic | pages=184 | isbn=0-521-77287-7 ]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 ofPaul Samuelson . It was from Samuelson's subsequent writing that "random walk" (and subsequently Brownian motion) became fundamental tomathematical finance .In 1951 he introduced the
Minimax regret criterion used indecision theory .The
Hewitt-Savage zero-one law is (in part) named after him.ee also
*
Loss function
*Friedman-Savage utility function External links
*MacTutor Biography|id=Savage
* [http://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=5192 Entry at the Mathematics Genealogy Project]Notes
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