A fun game to play. If you go to the article and load Appendix 1, their list is quite nice. Aesthetics meets epistemology. As an applied statistician, I might try to identify some relevant dimensions: breadth (scope of stuff collected), depth (contingent nature of stuff collected), simplicity (with elegance and surprise as sub elements), and consequences. But then you run into the lack of a complete ordering on R
k, and advocacy begins. For probability theory, I would want to include the Law of the Iterated Logarithm. Good breadth, depth, and surprise. I'll concede the other axes. The Ergodic Theorem is lovely as well. For statistics, it is odd, because beauty is not what we strive for. Still, if I had to make a pitch for being on a list I would go with Wald's Fundamental Identiity. Sequential notions still get pretty short shrift in statistics and stopping times are worth thinking about.
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Robert Hoekstra
Mathematical statistician
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
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Original Message:
Sent: 04-16-2017 22:55
From: David Bernklau
Subject: "The World's Most Beautiful Mathematical Equation"
That in the Subject above is the title of an article by Richard A. Friedman in today's [16 April 2017] NYTimes. (My guess is many in this community will guess Friedman's choice. Friedman refers to it as an "identity" but such is in error; it comes from an identity.)
Here's a link to the article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/opinion/sunday/the-worlds-most-beautiful-mathematical-equation.html?ref=opinion
BTW, What should be considered the most beautiful equation/formula in Statistics??
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David Bernklau
(David Bee on Internet)
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