Rollo Davidson (b.

Bristol Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city i ...

, 8 October 1944, d.

Piz Bernina Piz Bernina ( Romansh, it, Pizzo Bernina, ) is the highest mountain in the Eastern Alps, the highest point of the Bernina Range, and the highest peak in the Rhaetian Alps. It rises and is located south of Pontresina and near the major Alpi ...

, 29 July 1970) was a probabilist, alpinist, and Fellow-elect of

Churchill College, Cambridge Churchill College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It has a primary focus on science, engineering and technology, but still retains a strong interest in the arts and humanities. In 1958, a trust was establis ...

, who died aged 25 on

. He is known for his work on

semigroup In mathematics, a semigroup is an algebraic structure consisting of a Set (mathematics), set together with an associative internal binary operation on it. The binary operation of a semigroup is most often denoted multiplication, multiplicatively ...

stochastic geometry In mathematics, stochastic geometry is the study of random spatial patterns. At the heart of the subject lies the study of random point patterns. This leads to the theory of spatial point processes, hence notions of Palm conditioning, which exten ...

, and

stochastic analysis Stochastic calculus is a branch of mathematics that operates on stochastic processes. It allows a consistent theory of integration to be defined for integrals of stochastic processes with respect to stochastic processes. This field was created ...

, and for the

Rollo Davidson Prize The Rollo Davidson Prize is a prize awarded annually to early-career probabilists by the Rollo Davidson trustees. It is named after English mathematician Rollo Davidson (1944–1970). Rollo Davidson Trust In 1970, Rollo Davidson, a Fellow-el ...

, given in his name to early-career probabilists.

Life

At the time of Davidson's birth, his parents lived in The Chantry,

Thornbury, Gloucestershire Thornbury is a market town and civil parish in the South Gloucestershire unitary authority area of England, about 12 miles (19 km) north of Bristol. It had a population of 12,063 at the 2011 Census. The population has risen to 14,496 in the 202 ...

. His mother was Priscilla (née Chilver); his father, Brian Davidson, won a prize at Oxford for his study of classics, was president of the

Oxford Union The Oxford Union Society, commonly referred to simply as the Oxford Union, is a debating society in the city of Oxford England, whose membership is drawn primarily from the University of Oxford. Founded in 1823, it is one of Britain's oldest ...

, and worked as a solicitor before becoming an executive with the

Bristol Aeroplane Company The Bristol Aeroplane Company, originally the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company, was both one of the first and one of the most important British aviation companies, designing and manufacturing both airframes and aircraft engines. Notable a ...

. Rollo Davidson attended

Winchester College Winchester College is a public school (fee-charging independent day and boarding school) in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It was founded by William of Wykeham in 1382 and has existed in its present location ever since. It is the oldest of ...

before studying mathematics at

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

, from 1962 and becoming a research fellow there in 1967.Rollo Davidson: 1944–1970
Reprinted from pp. 449–452 and pp. 381–384. He completed his PhD in 1968, under the supervision of

David George Kendall David George Kendall FRS (15 January 1918 – 23 October 2007) was an English statistician and mathematician, known for his work on probability, statistical shape analysis, ley lines and queueing theory. He spent most of his academic lif ...

. He continued at Cambridge as assistant lecturer, lecturer, and in 1970 fellow-elect. He died in a mountain climbing accident in 1970.

Contributions

, Davidson is known for introducing the study of line processes, which he modelled as

point process In statistics and probability theory, a point process or point field is a collection of mathematical points randomly located on a mathematical space such as the real line or Euclidean space. Kallenberg, O. (1986). ''Random Measures'', 4th edition ...

es on spaces of parameters of lines. The second winner of the Rollo Davidson Prize, Olav Kallenberg, won the prize for settling (negatively) a conjecture on line processes posed by Davidson in his thesis. In

, also, Davidson has been described as a "remarkably original mathematician" who left a legacy of "tantalising unsolved problems". He particularly studied Delphic semigroups, a class of

topological semigroup In mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in mode ...

s introduced by his advisor to study renewal sequences; write that, despite the many applications of these semigroups, Davidson was "the only one to contribute seriously to Delphic theory" after Kendall, and that "his untimely death certainly deprived this theory of interesting developments".

Legacy

In 1975 a fund was established at Churchill College in his memory, endowed initially through the publication in his honour of two volumes of papers, edited by E. F. Harding and D. G. Kendall. A prize from the Rollo Davidson Trust Fund has been awarded annually since 1976 to early-career probabilists.Rollo Davidson Awards 1976 - 2021
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Life

Contributions

Legacy

See also

References

Further reading