Glenn Shafer (born November 21, 1946) is an American mathematician and statistician. He is the co-creator of Dempster–Shafer theory. He is a University Professor and Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University.

Early life and education

Shafer grew up on a farm near Caney, Kansas. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University, then entered the Peace Corps, serving in Afghanistan. He returned to Princeton, earning a PhD in mathematical statistics in 1973 under Geoffrey Watson.[1][2]

Career

He taught at Princeton and the University of Kansas, joining the faculty of Rutgers Business School – Newark and New Brunswick in 1992. From 2011 to 2014 he served as dean of the school.

During the 1970s and 1980s he expanded a theory first introduced by Arthur P. Dempster to create Dempster–Shafer theory, also described as the theory of belief functions or evidence theory. It is a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty, allowing one to combine evidence from different sources and arrive at a degree of belief (represented by a mathematical object called belief function) that takes into account all the available evidence.[3] The theory and its extensions have been of particular interest to the artificial intelligence community.[4]

More recently he worked with Vladimir Vovk to develop a game-theoretic framework for probability. That work produced a 2001 book, Probability and Finance: It's Only a Game! A joint research group between Rutgers and Royal Holloway, University of London has produced more than 50 working papers on the subject.[5]

Principal publications

  • Shafer, Glenn, A Mathematical Theory of Evidence, Princeton University Press, 1976.[6]
  • Shafer, Glenn, and Vovk, Vladimir, Probability and Finance: It's Only a Game!, John Wiley and Sons, 2001.[7]

Recognition

He is designated as a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers. The University of Prague recognized him with an honorary doctorate. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.[1] He was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1992.[8]

Personal life

He is married to retired Princeton professor and artist Nell Irvin Painter.

References

  1. 1 2 "Glenn Shafer". Rutgers University. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
  2. ↑ "Glenn Shafer". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 13 July 2022.
  3. ↑ Fine, Terrence L. (1977). "Review: Glenn Shafer, A mathematical theory of evidence". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 83 (4): 667–672. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1977-14338-3.
  4. ↑ Zadeh, L. A. (1984). "Review of A Mathematical Theory of Evidence (PDF)". AI Magazine. 5 (3).
  5. ↑ "The Game-Theoretic Probability and Finance Project". Probability and Finance. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
  6. ↑ Shafer, Glenn; A Mathematical Theory of Evidence, Princeton University Press, 1976, ISBN 0-608-02508-9
  7. ↑ Shafer, Glenn; Vovk, Vladimir (2001). Probability and Finance: It's Only a Game!. Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics. ISBN 978-0471402268.
  8. ↑ "Elected AAAI Fellows". AAAI. Retrieved 2024-01-03.
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