April 5, 2017
Briefly
- If someone told me a longstanding problem in mathematical statistics had been solved, but then admitted the proof was short, used fairly elementary techniques, was written with Microsoft Word, and was published in the Far East Journal of Theoretical Statistics, I might not be in a hurry to look it up. These are all genuinely reasonable filters for mathematical papers that are worth putting effort into. But, in this case, they were all false positives. Quanta Magazine has the story.
- From The Conversation,”The seven deadly sins of statistical misinterpretation, and how to avoid them“.
- From Newsroom (who seem to be quite good so far) Interaction of recreational genotyping and health insurance in NZ
- From The Conversation, how website terms of use (and their potential criminal enforcement in the US) affect research into fairness and transparency of algorithms.
- Graphics from Nathan Yau at Flowing Data on when Americans had significant life events, including one on When Straight Americans Lost Their Virginity that was so good the Daily Mail asked to use it, were refused, and used it anyway.
- Good Herald interview on air pollution with NIWA scientist Elizabeth Somervell
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
if you discover a proof of a longstanding theorem, does it get named after you ?
8 years ago
Sometimes. If it’s well-known enough, probably not — people will keep using the name they were already using. It’s still “Fermat’s Last Theorem”, not “Wiles’s Theorem”.
In this case, though, the theorem is more general than the Gaussian Concentration Inequality, so there’s more chance of people referring to the general result as Royen’s Theorem
8 years ago