FAMOUS CROATS , William Feller

William Feller William Feller is a prominent Croatian-American mathematician born on 7 July 1906 in Zagreb to the famous pharmacy family Feller. He studied mathematics for the first two years at the University of Zagreb, and continued it in Göttingen, where he received his doctorate as early as in 1926, from the famous mathematician Richard Courant. With the advent of Nazism on European soil, he emigrated from Europe in 1939 to the United States. He initially worked at Brown and Cornell Universities, and from 1950 at Princeton University. For the journal Zentralblatt für Mathematik 1934, Feller wrote a review of A. N. Kolmogorov's famous book Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung. He was one of the initiators and first editors-in-chief of the journal Mathematical Reviews 1939. Feller was also listed among the founders of probability theory as a scientific discipline. He is best known for his monograph An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications translated into Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Polish and Hungarian. It should be mentioned that approximately 150 mathematical terms bear his name. He was entrusted with a plenary lecture at the International Mathematical Congress in Edinburgh in 1958. In 1953 in Zagreb he gave a lecture in Croatian entitled Mathematical Theory of Diffusion. According to professor Vladimir Vranic, Feller’s friend, “...not only did Vilim Feller not hide his Croatian descent, but was also proud of it.” W. Feller was a member of several national academies: the former Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, the Royal Danish Academy, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston and the Royal Statistical Society in London, and also an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society. Feller won the prestigious National Medal of Science in 1969, also called Presidential Award, an honour bestowed by the President of the United States, and his widow Clara received it posthumously in 1970. To this day, Feller remains the only Croatian scientist with such recognition. William Feller died on 14 January 1970 in New York, where he is buried, and his name is engraved on the family tomb in Zagreb's Mirogoj cemetery. www.croatianhistory.net/etf/feller.html Professor Darko Žubrinić, PhD