Another Fields Medallist gets a blog…

Tim Gowers has a weblog, imaginatively entitled Gowers’s Weblog. I find it difficult to imagine this will be anything other than a fascinating read.

Sergio Servetto, 1968-2007

Prof Servetto died in a private plane crash on July 24.  The IEEE Information Society has more information.

Sally Clark, 1965-2007

Sally Clark, the solictor wrongly imprisoned between 1999 and 2003 for the murder of both her young sons, died this morning, according to BBC News.

Her conviction, and subsequent acquittal, became very famous in the UK, particular because of some of the statistics offered by an expert witness, Sir Roy Meadow. Meadow’s evidence was, basically, that the chance of both of Sally Clark’s sons dying of natural causes was so slim, that one had to assume that they were murdered. The structure of his argument was as follows:

The chance of a randomly chosen child dying or Sids (Sudden Infant Death Syndome, popularly known as cot death) is about 1 in 3000.

Amongst non-smoking, older parents, with at least one wage, this rises to about 1 in 8500.

The chance of both Sally Clark’s sons dying of Sids is about 1 in 8500×8500, or 1 in 73 million.

The chance that the two boys were not murdered is 1 in 73 million.

George Dantzig and the Simplex Algorithm

Ars Mathematica informs me of the latest issue of Notices of the AMS, which include two features – here (pdf) and here (pdf) – on George Dantzig, who died in 2005.

An anecdote Dantzig often told was this:

During my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of Neyman’s classes. On the blackboard were two problems which I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework – the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual. I asked him if he still wanted the work. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever.

About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o’clock, Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.” For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard which I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.

Dantzig is most famous for his simplex algorithm. The simplex algorithm is a method of solving linear programming problems, that is problems that look like

Maximize

subject to

You can find out more about this remarkable algorithm – apparently one of the top 10 algorithms of all time – at the second article above (pdf), in more detail by Spyros Reveliotis, or less detail on Wikipedia.