Dear Section members,
Following up an a previous note. Thank you. I appreciate the offers of German to English translation assistance from section members. And I will be contacting the volunteers in the near future. IN particular for those who volunteered to help with translation, I believe I may have located the library holding copies of Albert Einsteins letters of reference for Emil Gumbel. Those would need to be translated to English. I will also be attending the entire JSM in Portland, and I look forward to meeting section members.
www.barkerstats.com/PDFs/ASA/Emil Gumbel/Gumbel AMSTAT News V03.pdf
- The note at the above link, The attached is a deliberately short draft note for inclusion in a forthcoming (TBD) amstat news. Subsequently with the suggestion of the ASA History of Statistics Interest Group, very likely I will submit a longer article in Chance, .
Currently titled (links below)
Until I found the exhibit about Gumbel in the museum in Berlin Germany I had only known about his work on statistics of extremes and the Gumbel Distribution.
This draft (likely too lengthy for AMSTAT news) includes a link to a table that Gumbel prepared. Gumbels "polititcal writings" , including , caused him considerable trouble with the National Socialists. who eventually declared him an enemy of the state. Gumbel was stripped of professorship (By the University) and citizenship by the Facist government. And prior to his departure from Germany an "SS goon squad" was sent to Gumbels house, fortunately Gumbel and his family weren't at home. Then after he and his family escaped Germany and moved to France, Gumbel's books were burned.
One (of the many ) tables (link below) , where Gumbel himself collected the data and reported in 1938 while in Germany about the so called "political murders" that occurred prior to the start of WWII, and one of the several reasons the National Socialists organized the book burning of Gumbels work. The political murders were mainly for those accused of being traitors. the German name is the Fememorde
Gumbel's tabulation, of Political Murders circa 1938 is chilling and persuasive. (the identical link in the URL above)
http://www.barkerstats.com/PDFs/ASA/Emil%20Gumbel/PoliticalMurdersTabulation_Gumbell.pdf
I am continuing to dig into Gumbel's history of , courage, Pacificism and resistance against the National Socialists.. I will have more to report at a future date.
Thank you all.
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Chris Barker, Ph.D.
Past Chair
Statistical Consulting Section
Consultant and
Adjunct Associate Professor of Biostatistics
www.barkerstats.com---
"In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds."
-Steve Lacy
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