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. Comparatively little has been written about him in English; the second half of this paper attempts to remedy this.
Funding Statement
Persi Diaconis’s research was partially supported by NSF Grant DMS-1954042.
Acknowledgments
We thank Alexei Borodin and Ilya Khayutin for help with the Russian literature, Stanford Librarian Ashley Jester for help with the Stanford Archives, Sunny Scott and her Stanford history experts for information about Uspensky during his time at Stanford and Stephen DeSalvo, Stewart Ethier, Jim Pitman, Eugenio Regazzini, Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, Steve Stigler and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.
Citation
Persi Diaconis. Sandy Zabell. "In Praise (and Search) of J. V. Uspensky." Statist. Sci. 38 (1) 160 - 183, February 2023. https://doi.org/10.1214/22-STS866
Information
