Herman Chernoff

Herman Chernoff ( born July 1, 1923 in New York) is an American mathematician. His main field of statistics he has made several fundamental contributions. According to him, the Chernoff inequality and the Chernoff information are named.

Chernoff acquired in 1943 with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, minor in physics, at the City College of New York. Subsequently, he was employed as a physicist with the U.S. Navy. In 1946 he started his Ph.D. Thesis ( PhD ) in the field of applied mathematics at Brown University and she finished at Columbia University. From 1948 on, he studied at the University of Chicago and from 1951 on he studied at Stanford University. In 1974, he moved to MIT, where he founded a statistics center and 1985. To the Department of Statistics at Harvard University Herman Chernoff married in 1947 and has two daughters.

He was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. On the occasion of his 60th birthday the work to him, " Recent Advances in Statistics" was published in honor.

Chernoff Faces

He is also the inventor of the Chernoff faces, with which various data are combined to form faces. The data presented in face shape can, for example, as opposed to tables of numbers are recorded and processed much faster by humans. The cause lies in the human usually well developed ability to detect minute details and differences in facial features ( facial expressions ).

Writings

• With Lincoln E. Moses, Elementary decision theory, Wiley New York, 1967.
• Sequential analysis and optimal design, Soc. for Industrial and Applied Math, Philadelphia, 1972.