Glenn Shafer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Glenn Shafer (born November 21, 1946) is an American mathematician and statistician. He is the co-creator of Dempster–Shafer theory. He is a university professor and a board of governors professor at Rutgers University, as well as a former dean of its business school.
Shafer grew up on a farm near Caney, Kansas. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University, then entered the Peace Corps, serving in Afghanistan. He returned to Princeton, earning a PhD in mathematical statistics in 1973 under Geoffrey Watson.[1][2]
Career
Shafer taught at Princeton and the University of Kansas, joining the faculty of Rutgers Business School – Newark and New Brunswick in 1992. From 2011 to 2014, he served as dean of the business school of the university.
During the 1970s and 1980s Shafer expanded a theory first introduced by the Harvard professor, Arthur P. Dempster, to create Dempster–Shafer theory, also described as, the theory of belief functions or evidence theory. It is a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty, allowing one to combine evidence from different sources and to arrive at a degree of belief (represented by a mathematical object called belief function) that takes into account all the available evidence.[3] The theory and its extensions have been of particular interest to the artificial intelligence community.[4]
More recently Shafer worked with Vladimir Vovk to develop a game-theoretic framework for probability. That work produced a 2001 book, Probability and Finance: It's Only a Game!. A joint research group between Rutgers and Royal Holloway, University of London has produced more than 50 working papers on the subject.[5]
Principal publications
- Shafer, Glenn, A Mathematical Theory of Evidence, Princeton University Press, 1976.[6]
- Shafer, Glenn, and Vovk, Vladimir, Probability and Finance: It's Only a Game!, John Wiley and Sons, 2001.[7]
- Shafer, Glenn, and Vovk, Vladimir, Game‐Theoretic Foundations for Probability and Finance, John Wiley and Sons, 2019.[8]
Recognition
Shafer is designated as a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers. The University of Prague recognized him with an honorary doctorate. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.[1] He was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1992.[9]
