Emil Julius Gumbel
Encyclopedia
Emil Julius Gumbel was a Jewish mathematician
and political writer
.
Born in Munich, he graduated from the University of Munich shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. He was Professor of Mathematical Statistics
at the University of Heidelberg.
Following the murder of a friend, he attended the trial where he saw that the judge completely ignored evidence against the Brown Shirts Nazis. Horrified, he ardently investigated many similar political murders that had occurred and published his findings in Four Years of Political Murder in 1922. In 1928, he published Causes of Political Murder and also tried to create a political group to counter Nazism. When he died in 1966, Gumbel's papers were made a part of The Emil J. Gumbel Collection, Political Papers of an Anti-Nazi Scholar in Weimar and Exile. These papers include reels of microfilm that document his activities against the Nazis.
Gumbel was also one of the 33 signers of the 1932 Dringender Appell.
Along with Leonard Tippett and Ronald Fisher
, he pioneered the mathematical field of extreme value theory
. The Gumbel distribution was named after him.
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
and political writer
Political journalism
Political journalism is a broad branch of journalism that includes coverage of all aspects of politics and political science, although the term usually refers specifically to coverage of civil governments and political power....
.
Born in Munich, he graduated from the University of Munich shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. He was Professor of Mathematical Statistics
Mathematical statistics
Mathematical statistics is the study of statistics from a mathematical standpoint, using probability theory as well as other branches of mathematics such as linear algebra and analysis...
at the University of Heidelberg.
Following the murder of a friend, he attended the trial where he saw that the judge completely ignored evidence against the Brown Shirts Nazis. Horrified, he ardently investigated many similar political murders that had occurred and published his findings in Four Years of Political Murder in 1922. In 1928, he published Causes of Political Murder and also tried to create a political group to counter Nazism. When he died in 1966, Gumbel's papers were made a part of The Emil J. Gumbel Collection, Political Papers of an Anti-Nazi Scholar in Weimar and Exile. These papers include reels of microfilm that document his activities against the Nazis.
Gumbel was also one of the 33 signers of the 1932 Dringender Appell.
Along with Leonard Tippett and Ronald Fisher
Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation...
, he pioneered the mathematical field of extreme value theory
Extreme value theory
Extreme value theory is a branch of statistics dealing with the extreme deviations from the median of probability distributions. The general theory sets out to assess the type of probability distributions generated by processes...
. The Gumbel distribution was named after him.
