William "Vilim" Feller, born Vilibald Srećko Feller, was a Croatian-American mathematician specializing in probability theory.
Early life and education
Feller was born in Zagreb to Ida Oemichen-Perc, a Croatian-Austrian Roman Catholic, and Eugen Viktor Feller, son of a Polish-Jewish father and an Austrian mother. Eugen Feller was a famous chemist and created Elsa fluid named after his mother. According to Gian-Carlo Rota, Eugen Feller's surname was a "Slavic tongue twister", which William changed at the age of twenty. This claim appears to be false. His forename, Vilibald, was chosen by his Catholic mother for the saint day of his birthday.
Work
Feller held a docent position at the University of Kiel beginning in 1928. Because he refused to sign a Nazi oath, he fled the Nazis and went to Copenhagen, Denmark in 1933. He also lectured in Sweden. As a refugee in Sweden, Feller reported being troubled by increasing fascism at the universities. He reported that the mathematician Torsten Carleman would offer his opinion that Jews and foreigners should be executed. Finally, in 1939 he arrived in the U.S. where he became a citizen in 1944 and was on the faculty at Brown and Cornell. In 1950 he became a professor at Princeton University. The works of Feller are contained in 104 papers and two books on a variety of topics such as mathematical analysis, theory of measurement, functional analysis, geometry, and differential equations in addition to his work inmathematical statistics and probability. Feller was one of the greatest probabilists of the twentieth century, who is remembered for his championing of probability theory as a branch of mathematical analysis in Sweden and the United States. In the middle of the 20th century, probability theory was popular in France and Russia, while mathematical statistics was more popular in the United Kingdom and the United States, according to the Swedish statistician, Harald Cramér. His two-volume textbook on probability theory and its applications was called "the most successful treatise on probability ever written" by Gian-Carlo Rota. By stimulating his colleagues and students in Sweden and then in the United States, Feller helped establish research groups studying the analytic theory of probability. In his research, Feller contributed to the study of the relationship between Markov chains and differential equations, where his theory of generators of one-parameter semigroups of stochastic processes gave rise to the theory of "Feller operators".
