Per Martin-Löf

Per Martin-Löf, born on 8 May 1942, is a Swedish logician, philosopher and mathematical statistician, known for work on the foundations of probability, statistics, mathematical logic and computer science. In 1964 and 1965 he studied in Moscow under Andrey Kolmogorov, and his 1966 article on random sequences gave the first suitable definition of a random sequence, using the theory of computation to define a test for randomness; the resulting notion is called Martin-Löf randomness. Since the late 1970s his publications have been mainly in logic, where he developed intuitionistic type theory as a constructive foundation of mathematics, an approach that has also influenced computer science. He took his doctorate at Stockholm University in 1970 under Kolmogorov and held a joint chair of mathematics and philosophy there until he retired in 2009. His brother Anders Martin-Löf, also a statistician, collaborated with him on exponential families and model selection.