William Feller

William ( Vilim ) Feller, called Willy Feller, (* July 7, 1906 in Zagreb, † January 14, 1970 in New York City ) was an American mathematician with special merits in the field of probability theory.

Feller began his mathematics studies at the University of Zagreb, which he continued in 1925 in Göttingen, where he studied with David Hilbert and Richard Courant and 1926 received his doctorate at the Courant. In 1928 he accepted a position as a lecturer at the University of Kiel, but fled because of his Jewish origin in 1933 from the Nazis from Germany. After stops in Copenhagen ( with Harald Bohr) and Stockholm ( with Harald Cramér ) he arrived in 1939 with his wife Clara Mary Nielsen, whom he had married in 1938, in the United States, whose citizens he was in 1944. He went first in 1939 at Brown University and in 1944 ( as a colleague of Mark Kac ) at Columbia University. In 1950 he was appointed professor at Princeton University.

Feller published many papers covering different areas of mathematics. Several theorems from the field of probability theory to bear his name. He was also a member of the Royal Statistical Society and president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Feller was with Otto Neugebauer 1934-1938 out the Zentralblatt für Mathematik, both the 1934 relocated to Copenhagen. In 1939, he was with Neugebauer, who also went to Brown University, one of the founders of the Mathematical Reviews and its first editor in chief.

His major work is the two-volume textbook "An introduction to probability theory and its applications ", which is still cited and one of the best mathematical textbooks of the 20th century.

Feller was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. In 1959 he received the National Medal of Science. In 1950 he held a Invited Lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Cambridge (Massachusetts ) ( Some recent trends in the mathematical theory of diffusion ) and 1958 a plenary lecture at the ICM in Edinburgh ( Some new connections in between probability and classical analysis).

Works

  • An introduction to probability theory and its applications. Volume 1: Wiley, New York 1950, ISBN 0-471-25708-7, Volume 2: Wiley, New York 1966, ISBN 0-471-25709-5.
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