Abstract
The two of us have shared a fascination with James Victor Uspensky’s 1937 textbook Introduction to Mathematical Probability ever since our graduate student days: it contains many interesting results not found in other books on the same subject in the English language, together with many non-trivial examples, all clearly stated with careful proofs. We present some of Uspensky’s gems to a modern audience hoping to tempt others to read Uspensky for themselves, as well as report on a few of the other mathematical topics he also wrote about (e.g., his book on number theory contains early results about perfect shuffles). Uspensky led an interesting life: a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he spoke at the 1924 International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto before leaving Russia in 1929 and coming to the US and Stanford.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 160-183 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Statistical Science |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2023 |
Keywords
- A. A. Markov
- Bernoulli’s theorem
- card shuffling
- J. V. Uspensky
- Lexis ratio
- Markov’s method of continued fractions
- probability theory
- Russian mathematics
- Stanford Mathematics Department
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Statistics and Probability
- Mathematics(all)
- Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty