A major link exchange dealing with

William Feller

The most authoritative source of biographies of outstanding mathematicians offered by the WWW is The Mac Tutor History of Mathematics Archive, Scotland, UK. It has been designed and prepared by professors John J O'Connor and Edmund F Robertson. This enormous web site contains biographies of three Croatian mathematicians:

Ruđer Bošković

William Feller

Marin Getaldić

It is my pleasant duty to report that since the May 2007 the article dealing with William Feller has a link to the following web site

www.croatianhistory.net/etf/feller.html

which is, without any doubt, the most exhaustive presentation of Feller's spectacular scientific biography. By now this web page has more than 60 printed pages, including numerous photos.


I take the opportunity to express my deep gratitude to professor John J. O'Connor for a very fast response to my e-mail, in which I proposed a few corrections regarding Feller's biographical data in the first three sentences.

Since similar mistakes can be found throughout the web (the source of mistakes is Gian Carlo Rota, a well known Italian-American mathematician), I find it pertinent to include a part of my recent e-mail sent to professor O'Connor, in order to indicate the problem:

... I have found the MacTutor History of Mathematics web pages very useful, my sincere congratulations for a truly great job. To introduce myself, I am employed at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, working in elliptic PDEs and fractal analysis of Dynamical systems. Since the last year I began to collect data about William Feller in a systematic way. I have recently been encouraged by Professor John Aldrich (Division of Economics, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton) to write to You. He has created a very nice web page "Figures From the History of Probability and Statistics", available at http://www.economics.soton.ac.uk/staff/aldrich/Figures.htm Last year I have been asked also by descendants of Feller's father, living in Zagreb, to contact You. Namely, some of the data about Feller provided by Gian Carlo Rota, and cited at the beginning of Your (otherwise excellent) article, are incorrect. In particular, Feller's second name, contrary to Rota's claim, was always Feller. Also the name of "Willibrord" provided by Rota is wrong, as well as his claim about a "Slavic tongue twister" (Rota must have misunderstood something). It is unfortunate that these (Rota's) mistakes appear in the first three sentences of Your article. Alow me to cite these three sentences from the very beginning of Your article, with my remarks in angular brackets: William Feller's parents were Ida Perc [maybe rather Oemichen - since this was her father's second name; Perc or Pertz is the second name of her mother] and Eugene [should be Eugen] V Feller - well that is not strictly true since the family surname was not Feller [this is wrong] but, as Gian-Carlo Rota put it, a Slavic tongue twister [!?] which William changed when he was about twenty years old [he changed Vilim to Willy in Germany, but he was born as Vilibald Srecko, and changed to Vilim at the age of 17, when entering the University of Zagreb], so his father never used the name Feller [totally wrong claim of Rota]. In fact his first name was not William [true: he was born as Vilibald Srecko in 1906] either! Rather it was Willibrord [no, it was Vilibald Srecko (Srecko=Felix)] which was the name of the Saint [Vilibald] whose day falls on his birthday. His mother was a Roman Catholic and so he was christened Willibrord [Vilibald], but was known as Willy (and he even [understandably for the period of his life in Germany] used the name Willy Feller on his papers into the 1940s). ... Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson A. Following a recent suggestion of Professor Aldrich, I am free to ask You to take into account my web page containing a detailed Feller's biography (more than 60 pp), available at the following address: www.croatianhistory.net/etf/feller.html hoping that in the future it might appear among links offered at the end of Your article about Feller. I understand that it will take time until You check the quality and reliability of my article. ...

As it usually happens in mathematicis and with mathematicians, there were more fruits than expected! Indeed, professor O'Connor kindly sent me a PDF file containing Feller's plenary lecture delivered at the 1958 International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh (Scotland).

Expressing again my deep appreciation to professors John J O'Connor and Edmund F Robertson for their wonderful web site, I invite You to visit and enjoy The Mac Tutor History of Mathematics Archive.

Many thanks also to Nenad Bach for encouriging me to write this article.

PS. For those who maybe doubt that William Feller is an important figure in the History of Mathematics, I provide an amazing list of mathematical notions bearing his name:

1. Feller theory
2. Feller process
3. Feller minimal process
4. strong Feller process
5. doubly Feller process
6. Feller property
7. strong Feller's property
8. weak Feller's property
9. Feller class
10. Feller chain
11. Feller-McKean chain
12. Feller-Markov chains
13. Quasi-Feller Markov chains
14. Feller extension
15. Feller's decomposition
16. Feller's road map
17. Feller diffusion process
18. two-parameter Feller process
19. Doubly-Feller process
20. Feller branching diffusion
21. Feller transition function
22. Feller's representation
23. Feller's construction
24. Feller transition probabilities
25. Feller-Reuter-Riley (FRR) property
26. Feller-Reuter-Riley transition function
27. Feller continuity
28. Feller semigroup
29. Feller-Dynkin semigroup
30. Feller-Dynkin diffusion
31. Feller-Dynkin process
32. Feller-Dynkin propagators
33. Feller-Dynkin characterizations
34. Feller generator
35. Feller's transformation
36. Feller's randomization technique
37. Chung-Feller theorem
38. Feller-Lindvall diffusion
39. Feller-Lamperti-Lindvall invariance principle
40. Feller-Pareto distribution
41. Feller data
42. Feller's parametric equations
43. Feller operator
44. sub-Feller operator
45. discrete Feller operator
46. selfadjoint Feller operators
47. Feller kernel
48. Feller stochastic kernel
49. quasi-Feller kernels
50. Feller approximation
51. Feller perturbation
52. Feller resolvent
53. Feller minimal resolvent
54. Feller boundary
55. Feller's natural boundaries
56. Feller classification
57. Feller boundary classification
58. Feller-Wentzell-type boundary conditions
59. Feller-Ventcel' end conditions
60. Feller-Ueno boundary decomposition
61. Feller's domainated variation
62. Feller alternatives
63. Dirichlet-Feller operator
64. Trotter-Feller operator
65. Feller potential
66. Riesz-Feller potential
67. Riesz Feller derivative
68. Kato-Feller (Feller-Kato) potential
69. Kato-Feller class
70. Kato-Feller norm
71. Kato-Feller property
72. Trotter-Feller operator
73. Keldysh-Feller operator
74. Keldysh-Feller conditions
75. Feller Brownian motions
76. co-Feller operator
77. co-Feller Markov chain
78. stochastic compactness in Feller's sense
79. Feller's test for explosions
80. Lindeberg-Feller condition
81. generalized Feller condition
82. Feller-Lindeberg central limit theorem
83. Bernstein-Feller central limit theorem
84. Feller-Khintchine-Lévy central limit theorem
85. Feller's renewal theorem
86. Blackwell-Feller-Orey renewal theorem
87. Feller's theory of recurrent events
88. Feller's recurrent events
89. Feller's discrete time recurrent phenomena
90. concept of Feller-Gantos
91. Feller-Jirina-Lamperti convergence
92. Erdös-Feller-Pollard theorem
93. Feller's paradox
94. Chernoff-Feller-Klotz-Stone-Sievers approach
95. Aleksandrov-Busemann-Feller theorem
96. Busemann-Feller-Aleksandrov theorem
97. Busemann-Feller (BF) basis
98. Feller measures
99. Feller invariant measure
100. Feller system
101. Feller-Arley process (model)
102. Feller-Arley birth and death process
103. Feller minimal birth-death process
104. Feller minimal solutions
105. Feller's solution
106. Non-Feller model
107. Quasi-Feller model
108. Feller's coupling method
109. Dickey-Feller test
110. Lévy-Feller process
111. Lévy-Feller diffusion
112. Lévy-Feller advection-dispersion process
113. Markov-Feller (Feller-Markov) process
114. Markov-Feller semigroup
115. Markov-Feller (Feller-Markov) operators
116. Markov-Feller pair
117. Feller semi-Markov control processes
118. Krein-Feller operators
119. indefinite Krein-Feller differential operators
120. Krein-Feller (eigenvalue) problem
121. Krein-Feller second order derivative
122. Feller-Miyadera-Phillips theorem
123. Hille-Phillips-Feller-Miyadera conditions
124. Hille-Yosida-Feller-Phillips-Miyadera semigroup
125. Hille-Yosida-Feller theorem
126. Feller cocycle
127. Feller-Jirina theorem
128. Feller-Jirina scheme
129. Feller-Tornier constant
130. Generalized Feller equation
131. Feller solutions to SPDE's
132. Feller's law of the iterated logarithm
133. Feller-Erdös-Kolmogorov-Petrovski criterion
134. Petrovskii-Erdös-Feller integral functional
135. Feller-Fokker-Planck equation
136. Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov-Feller equation
137. Kolmogorov-Feller test
138. Kolmogorov-Erdös-Feller integral tests
139. KolmogorovFeller weak law of large numbers
140. Kolmogorov-Feller (Feller-Kolmogorov) equation
141. Kolmogorov-Feller integro-differential equation
142. Kolmogorov-Feller-Stratonovich equation
143. Kolmogorov-Feller theory of Markov processes
144. Kolmogorov-Feller jump processes
145. Kolmogorov-Feller-type operator

The list has been obtained using references on MathSciNet in the period between 1970 (since Feller's death) and 2007, citing Feller's name.

Paul C. Kettler, Norway:

...the personal aspects of creative lives are just as important I believe as the professional aspects. At the lowest level, it is personal interaction, after all, which produces great collaborations. Feller and Kolmogorov, across continents and ideologies, is the perfect example.

Since the May 2007 my web page about William Feller has been translated into Croatian by two students of mine, Ms Marta Kolar and Ms Ines Leskovar (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing): www.croatianhistory.net/etf/fellerh.html

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