Emil Julius Gumbel

Emil Julius Gumbel (1891 to 1966) was a German statistician and pacifist, born in Munich, whose work on the statistics of extreme values made his name familiar to engineers and actuaries long after his political career was forgotten. He studied at the University of Munich, took his doctorate in 1914 with a thesis on interpolating population figures, and then worked in Berlin with the statistician Ladislaus Bortkiewicz. He habilitated at Heidelberg in 1923 and taught mathematical statistics there until August 1932. In those years he published careful tallies of political murders in the Weimar Republic that compared the sentences given to killers on the left and on the right, and he spoke publicly against war and the Nazis, which brought rallies against him and repeated demands for his dismissal. Stripped of German citizenship in 1933, he taught in Paris and Lyon, became a French citizen in 1939, and reached New York in 1941 after the German invasion. He taught at the New School for Social Research and from 1953 at Columbia University, where he wrote Statistical Theory of Extreme Values and Some Practical Applications (1954) and Statistics of Extremes (1958). The Gumbel distribution, which models the largest or smallest value in a sample, and the Gumbel copula carry his name, and his formulas are used in flood and dam design, materials testing and insurance.