Irénée-Jules Bienaymé

Irenee -Jules Bienaymé ( born August 28, 1796 in Paris, † October 19, 1878 ) was a French probabilists and statisticians. In continuation of the work of Laplace, the method of least squares generalizing, he made ​​contributions to probability theory, statistics and their application to financial accounting, demography and social statistics. In particular, he has the Chebyshev expressed in terms of the law of large numbers (1869).

Life

The consequence of the great French probability theorist runs out with Bienaymé that begins with Pascal and Fermat and leads to Laplace and Poisson. According to him, one must look to England and Russia, to track the progress of the tray.

Despite his numerous contributions Bienaymé is only a pale reflection of his predecessors. His private life was marked by a series of misfortunes. He attended the Lyceum of Bruges, then the Lycée Louis -le- Grand in Paris, and after he was in 1814 involved in the defense of Paris, he refers 1815 École Polytechnique, but as one of that year group, the total in the following year because of its Bonapartist sympathies of Louis XVIII. is excluded from the university.

In 1818 he is a lecturer in mathematics at the Military School of Saint- Cyr, however, enter into force two years later, in the financial administration. Quick promoted to Inspector of Finance and in 1834 to the General Inspector of Finance, the Republic dismisses him in 1848 due to lack of republicanism. After he became professor of probability theory at the Sorbonne, he loses his position in 1851. Subsequently, he acts as a consultant and statistics expert for the government of Napoleon III.

After entering 1852 in the Academy of Sciences Bienaymé 23 years examiners for the award of the prize for statistics. As a founding member of the Société de France mathématique he stands her before 1875.

Work

Bienaymé has published only 23 articles, of which half appeared under obscure circumstances. His first works deal with demographics and mortality tables. He conducts research in particular about the extinction of closed family circle (about the the high nobility ) that are in decline, even though the population of France is growing, which leaves a bit to think of the fate of the French school of probability theory of his time.

As a student of Laplace and under the influence of the Analytical Theory of Probabilities (1812 ), he defended his views in an argument with Poisson on the size of the jury box and the required majority for a conviction. It generalizes the method of least squares to find the equation of Bienaymé.

He tries with his friend Antoine Augustin Cournot clean up in a probability statement that no longer thrives on big breath of his predecessors. After the hopes of a probabilistic description of the world by virtue of some universal laws, such as Jakob Bernoulli, Laplace and Poisson still entertained, the magic is now gone:

As a French translator of the works of his friend, the Russian mathematician Chebyshev Pafnuti Lvovitch, he published the Chebyshev 's inequality, which provides a simple and accurate proof of the law of large numbers.

Even with the pioneer of demography Quételet he maintains a correspondence and communication with Lamé in conjunction.

The always contentious Bienaymé criticized Poissons law of large numbers and had a quarrel with Cauchy.