Bruno de Finetti

Bruno de Finetti (1906 to 1985) was an Italian probabilist, statistician and actuary whose subjective theory of probability treats probability as an expression of the observer's own degree of belief. Born in Innsbruck to Italian parents, he studied at the Milan Polytechnic and the University of Milan, took his degree in 1927, and then worked at the Italian Central Statistical Institute and as an actuary at Assicurazioni Generali in Trieste before holding chairs at Trieste and at La Sapienza in Rome. He is known for the aphorism that probability does not exist, for his book Teoria della Probabilita, and for results on finitely additive measures, processes with independent increments, exchangeable sequences and associative means. His ideas reached English-speaking statisticians mainly through L J Savage in the 1950s.