Patrick Billingsley

Paul Patrick " Pat" Billingsley ( May 3, 1925 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, † April 22, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois ) was an American actor and mathematician who worked on probability theory.

Life

Billingsley grew up in Sioux Falls on the country as the son of a doctor. He studied at the United States Naval Academy as an engineer (Bachelor 1948) and until 1957 was an officer in the United States Navy. He was stationed, among other things in Japan, where he earned a black belt in Judo. Besides Billingsley studied mathematics at Princeton University, where in 1952 he took his Master's degree and received his doctorate in 1955 with William Feller (The invariance principle for dependent random variables, Transactions American Mathematical Society, Bd.83, 1956, p.250 ). In 1957/58 he was a Fellow of the National Science Foundation in Princeton. In 1958 he became Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his career as a mathematician, in 1963 with a full professorship of mathematics and statistics. 1980 to 1983 he was Head of the Department of Statistics and in 1994 he retired. He has been a visiting professor in the United Kingdom, India, Sweden and Italy.

Billingsley was from 1976 to 1979 editor of the Annals of Probability. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in Copenhagen (1964 /65) and as a Guggenheim Fellow 1972/72 Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.

Billingsley already dealt in 1960 with the Hausdorff dimension in probability theory, but also the application of limit theorems of probability theory in number theory. In 1974 he was awarded the Lester Randolph Ford Award for his essay Prime numbers and Brownian motion. Billingsley was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, which he was president in 1983, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At times, he also worked as a cryptanalyst for the National Security Agency.

In addition to his career as a mathematician, he was also an actor. He first played from 1966 at the Court Theatre at the University of Chicago and at the Body Politic Theatre, where he was often seen in the 1970s and 1980s in lead roles. This also led to supporting roles in films, first in 1977 in The Fury ( The Fury ) by Brian De Palma and eg in The Untouchables 1987: De Palma. He also played teacher ( in My Bodyguard, The Schulfhofratten of Chicago in 1980 by Tony Bill) and professors ( Somewhere in time, Somewhere in Time by Jeannot Szwarc 1980) and saw in an interview in 1978 a direct relation of his teaching career in acting.

He was married until her death in 2000 with the social activist Ruth Billingsley and had four daughters and a son. Billingsley died on April 22, 2011 after a short illness at his home in Chicago's Hyde Park.

Writings

  • Ergodic theory and information, Wiley 1965, Warrior 1978
  • Probability and Measure, Wiley 1979, 3rd edition 1995, ISBN 0471007102 (also translated into Polish )
  • Convergence of probability measures, Wiley 1968 1999
  • Collin J. Watson, among others: Statistics for Management and Economics, Boston, Allyn and Bacon 1990
  • With David L. Berger Hunt: Elements of Statistical Inference, Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 1973, 1981, 1987
  • Statistical inference for Markov Processes, University of Chicago Press 1961
  • Weak convergence of measures - applications in probability, 1971, SIAM
  • Billingsley "Prime Numbers and Brownian Motion", American Mathematical Monthly in 1973
The Fury (1978 film) Integrated Authority File
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