Feller, William

Feller, William

(1906–70) mathematician; born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Fleeing Nazism (1939), he settled at Brown University and was the first editor of Mathematical Reviews. A specialist in pure mathematics, he also enjoyed statistics and genetics. Best known for An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications (1950–66), he was also admired as a lecturer.

Feller, William

 

Born July 7, 1906, in Zagreb; died Jan. 14, 1970, in New York City. American mathematician. Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

Feller received his M.S. from the University of Zagreb in 1925 and his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1926. He became a professor at Princeton University in the USA in 1950. Feller’s principal scientific works deal with probability theory and its applications in genetics, physics, and economics. He obtained a number of important results on limit theorems of probability theory and on the theory of stochastic processes. Feller’s textbook on probability theory has received worldwide recognition.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Vvedenie v teoriiu veroiatnostei i ee prilozheniia, 2nd ed., vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1967.

REFERENCE

Cramér, H. “William Feller.” Revue de l’Institut international destatistique, 1970, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 435–36.