Related papers: Remembering Leo Breiman
I published an interview of Leo Breiman in Statistical Science [Olshen (2001)], and also the solution to a problem concerning almost sure convergence of binary tree-structured estimators in regression [Olshen (2007)]. The former summarized…
Leo Breiman was a unique character. There will not be another like him. I consider it one of my great fortunes in life to have know and worked with him. Along with John Tukey, Leo had the greatest influence on shaping my approach to…
In this paper I shall try to sketch some typical aspects of Erich Lehmann's contributions to statistics through his research, his teaching, his service to the profession and his personality.
Statistics is a uniquely difficult field to convey to the uninitiated. It sits astride the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the applied. It has a mathematical flavor and yet it is not simply a branch of mathematics. Its core…
I first met Leo Breiman in 1979 at the beginning of his third career, Professor of Statistics at Berkeley. He obtained his PhD with Lo\'eve at Berkeley in 1957. His first career was as a probabilist in the Mathematics Department at UCLA.…
In 1994, I came to Berkeley and was fortunate to stay there three years, first as a postdoctoral researcher and then as Neyman Visiting Assistant Professor. For me, this period was a unique opportunity to see other aspects and learn many…
Through the use of a system-building approach, an approach that includes finding common ground for the various philosophical paradigms within statistics, Erich L. Lehmann is responsible for much of the synthesis of classical statistical…
Breiman challenged statisticians to think more broadly, to step into the unknown, model-free learning world, with him paving the way forward. Statistics community responded with slight optimism, some skepticism, and plenty of disbelief.…
Motivated by Breiman's rousing 2001 paper on the "two cultures" in statistics, we consider the role that different modeling approaches play in causal inference. We discuss the relationship between model complexity and causal…
Professor Alan Selman has been a giant in the field of computational complexity for the past forty years. This article is an appreciation, on the occasion of his retirement, of some of the most lovely concepts and results that Alan has…
Twenty years ago Breiman (2001) called to our attention a significant cultural division in modeling and data analysis between the stochastic data models and the algorithmic models. Out of his deep concern that the statistical community was…
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
This is a short overview of the influence of mathematicians and their ideas on the creative contribution of Mikhailo Lomonosov on the occasion of the tercentenary of his birth.
Phillip L. Geissler made important contributions to the statistical mechanics of biological polymers, heterogeneous materials, and chemical dynamics in aqueous environments. He devised analytical and computational methods that revealed the…
A recent essay [1] reminds us of how richly Boltzmann deserves to be admiringly commemorated for the originality of his ideas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Without any doubt, the scientific community owes Boltzmann a great debt of…
During the period 1962--1964, I had a tenure track Assistant Professorship in Mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where I did research in probability theory, especially on linear diffusion processes. Being somewhat lonely…
The Rashomon Effect, coined by Leo Breiman, describes the phenomenon that there exist many equally good predictive models for the same dataset. This phenomenon happens for many real datasets and when it does, it sparks both magic and…
We argue here about the relevance and the ultimate unity of the Bayesian approach in a neutral and agnostic manner. Our main theme is that Bayesian data analysis is an effective tool for handling complex models, as proven by the increasing…
It is with pleasure and pride that I introduce this special section in honor of Ingram Olkin. This tribute is especially fitting because, among the many profound and far-reaching contributions that he has made to our profession, Ingram…
In a landmark paper published in 2001, Leo Breiman described the tense standoff between two cultures of data modeling: parametric statistical and algorithmic machine learning. The cultural division between these two statistical learning…