author from the region · 67 years to translation
#027
Jerzy Spława-Neyman → Donald B. Rubin
Kharkiv / Bydgoszcz / Warsaw (1923) → Statistical Science (1990)
A table of potential crop yields and a model of sampling without replacement, published in Polish in 1923, laid the mathematical foundation for the modern calculus of causality.
Read essay & primary-source documentation →
documented influence · 1989 experience
#017
Czesław Miłosz & Václav Havel → Timur Kuran
Vilnius / Warsaw (1951) · Hrádeček (1978) → World Politics (1991)
From the analysis of “Ketman” to the parable of the greengrocer: the Central European anatomy of living a dual truth became the basis for formal models of revolutionary cascades.
Read essay & primary-source documentation →
author from the region · statistical decision theory
#008
Abraham Wald
Cluj / Vienna → Statistical Research Group, Columbia (1943)
Trained in Karl Menger’s Vienna Mathematical Colloquium, Wald solved the paradox of missing data: armor the parts of returning bombers where there are no bullet holes.
Read essay & primary-source documentation →
author from the region · counterpoint
#020
Karl Popper & Ludwik Fleck
Vienna (1934) ↔ Lwów (1935)
Two Central European answers to how science works: Popper’s strict logic of conjecture and refutation versus the Lwów microbiologist Ludwik Fleck’s sociology of the thought collective.
Read essay & primary-source documentation →
author from the region · game theory
#062
John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern
Budapest / Vienna → Princeton (1944)
The meeting of the Budapest mathematical school and Viennese economic theory gave birth to the formal theory of games, coalitions, and strategic equilibria.
Read essay & primary-source documentation →
anticipation · 17 years ahead
#091
Stanisław Lem → Jean Baudrillard
Lwów / Kraków (“Summa Technologiae”, 1964) → Paris (1981)
In his chapter on “phantomatics,” Lem designed a complete engineering of sensory illusion and asked about the epistemic limits of a simulated world with no exit to base reality.
Read essay & primary-source documentation →