Rollo Davidson (b.

Bristol Bristol () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, the most populous city in the region. Built around the River Avon, Bristol, River Avon, it is bordered by t ...

, 8 October 1944, d.

Piz Bernina Piz Bernina (Romansh language, Romansh, , ) 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 in the Bernina Region and ne ...

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

Churchill College, Cambridge Churchill College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. It has a primary focus on science, engineering and technology, but retains a strong interest in the arts ...

, 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 together with an associative internal binary operation on it. The binary operation of a semigroup is most often denoted multiplicatively (just notation, not necessarily th ...

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 an ...

, and for the Rollo Davidson Prize, 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 authorities of England, unitary authority area of England, about north of Bristol. It had a population of 12,063 at the 2011 United Kingdom census, 2011 census, r ...

. 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 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 unive ...

, 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 ...

. Rollo Davidson attended

Winchester College Winchester College is an English Public school (United Kingdom), public school (a long-established fee-charging boarding school for pupils aged 13–18) with some provision for day school, day attendees, in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It wa ...

before studying mathematics at

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, 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 ...

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

mountain climbing Mountaineering, mountain climbing, or alpinism is a set of outdoor activities that involves ascending mountains. Mountaineering-related activities include traditional outdoor climbing, skiing, and traversing via ferratas that have become mounta ...

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 set of a random number of mathematical points randomly located on a mathematical space such as the real line or Euclidean space. Kallenberg, O. (1986). ''Random Measures'', ...

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 semigroups 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