Portrait of E.J. Gumbel. “I respect [Gumbel] even more as a person. His political activity and his publications are sustained by a lofty ethos. He is inspired by an uncompromising sense of justice. Men like him are indispensable if we are ever to build a sound political framework for our society''. Quotation by Albert Einstein. This photograph is courtesy of Patricia Gumbel.
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Emil Julius GUMBEL (1891-1966) was a German mathematician and political writer.
Following the murder of a friend, he attended the trial where he saw that the judge completely ignored evidence against the Brown Shirts Nazis. Horrified, he ardently investigated many similar political murders that had occurred and published his findings in Four Years of Political Murder in 1922. In 1928, he published Causes of Political Murder and also tried to create a political group to counter Nazism. Gumbel was also one of the 33 signers of the 1932 Dringender Appell.
Among the Nazi's most-hated public intellectuals, he was forced out of his position in Heidelberg in 1932.
Gumbel then moved to France, where he taught in Paris and at ISFA Lyon, and to the United States in 1940 where he taught at Columbia University in New York City until his death in 1966.
As a mathematician, Gumbel was instrumental in the development of extreme value theory, along with Leonard Tippett and Ronald Fisher. In 1958, Gumbel published a key book on the topic: Statistics of Extremes. He derived and analyzed the probability distribution that is now known as the Gumbel distribution in his honor.
(Source : Wikipedia)
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