from Hacker News

The Legend of Abraham Wald

by privatdozent on 2/11/23, 6:53 PM with 5 comments

• by heintje_ghulam on 2/12/23, 2:39 AM

  He made major contributions to statistics. The Wald test in statistics is named after him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wald_test). I think he was also a forerunner of decision theory and invented an early form of the minimax principle:

  Wald, A. (1939). Contributions to the theory of statistical estimation and testing hypotheses. The Annals of Mathematics, 10(4), 299-326.

• by qrian on 2/11/23, 11:59 PM

  Few weeks of intense reading to understand a whole semester's worth of mathematics... I'd also like to have that skill.

  Perhaps being homeschooled helped acquire such skill.

• by jbullock35 on 2/12/23, 12:30 AM

  The article covers so much -- and it doesn't even mention the "Wald estimator," which is part of the foundation of the modern (causal-inference-oriented) view of the method of instrumental variables.

• by smcin on 2/12/23, 12:32 AM

  ...died in 1950 aged 48 in a plane crash on an Indian lecture tour.

  Add to other mathematicians who would have been even more prominent if they hadn't died before their time: Galois, Ramanujan, Turing...

• by hackandthink on 2/12/23, 4:30 PM

  (when following Wald's work on rearranging series)

  This is a nice riddle:

  Is summing the series:

  1, -1, 1, 1,....

  0 = (1-1)+(1-1)+(1-1)....=0+0+0...

  or

  1 = 1+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+(-1+1)....=1+0+0+0...