A Conversaton with Leo Breiman

Abstract

Leo Breiman was born in New York City on January 27, 1928. His parents and he migrated five years later to San Francisco where he began school. During Leo's junior high school years, his family moved again, to Los Angeles. Leo graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1945 and entered the California Institute of Technology, from which he graduated four years later with a major in physics. He earned his Master's Degree in mathematics at Columbia University in 1950 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1954. Leo has broad ranging scientific and mathematical interests, including information theory and the theory of gambling. He has been involved in applications coming from studies of automobile traffic, air quality and toxic substance recognition. He is the author of a celebrated graduate text on probability theory, is one of four authors of Classification and Regression Trees and its associated CART^R software and has also written two other books. With Jerome Friedman, Leo developed the ACE (alternating conditional expectations) algorithm by which nonlinear relationships between the dependent variable and predictor variables in regression are described. He is the originator of “bagging” and “arcing,” both computer­intensive approaches to classification that are of much current interest.

Leo's professional positions have included being on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at UCLA, an independent consultant for 13 years and Professor of Statistics and founding Director of the Statistical Computing Facility at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he has had visiting positions at Stanford and at Yale. For his many contributions, Leo has been honored by Fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and in the American Statistical Association. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Berkeley Citation from the University of California. The interests and accomplishments of Leo Breiman extend outside the areas of professional statistician and probabilist. He was a waiter in the Catskills, a dishwasher in the Merchant Marine, a trekker into the heart of rainforest Africa, an active father to many children from a small agrarian Mexican village, a member and President of the Santa Monica School Board, the architect of his stunning home and an accomplished sculptor. Leo and his wife, Mary Lou, reside in Berkeley. He is the father of two daughters, Rebecca and Jessica.