Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Bibliography of J. F. C. Kingman
- 1 A fragment of autobiography, 1957–1967
- 2 More uses of exchangeability: representations of complex random structures
- 3 Perfect simulation using dominated coupling from the past with application to area-interaction point processes and wavelet thresholding
- 4 Assessing molecular variability in cancer genomes
- 5 Branching out
- 6 Kingman, category and combinatorics
- 7 Long-range dependence in a Cox process directed by an alternating renewal process
- 8 Kernel methods and minimum contrast estimators for empirical deconvolution
- 9 The coalescent and its descendants
- 10 Kingman and mathematical population genetics
- 11 Characterizations of exchangeable partitions and random discrete distributions by deletion properties
- 12 Applying coupon-collecting theory to computer-aided assessments
- 13 Colouring and breaking sticks: random distributions and heterogeneous clustering
- 14 The associated random walk and martingales in random walks with stationary increments
- 15 Diffusion processes and coalescent trees
- 16 Three problems for the clairvoyant demon
- 17 Homogenization for advection-diffusion in a perforated domain
- 18 Heavy traffic on a controlled motorway
- 19 Coupling time distribution asymptotics for some couplings of the Lévy stochastic area
- 20 Queueing with neighbours
- 21 Optimal information feed
- 22 A dynamical-system picture of a simple branching-process phase transition
- Index
1 - A fragment of autobiography, 1957–1967
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Bibliography of J. F. C. Kingman
- 1 A fragment of autobiography, 1957–1967
- 2 More uses of exchangeability: representations of complex random structures
- 3 Perfect simulation using dominated coupling from the past with application to area-interaction point processes and wavelet thresholding
- 4 Assessing molecular variability in cancer genomes
- 5 Branching out
- 6 Kingman, category and combinatorics
- 7 Long-range dependence in a Cox process directed by an alternating renewal process
- 8 Kernel methods and minimum contrast estimators for empirical deconvolution
- 9 The coalescent and its descendants
- 10 Kingman and mathematical population genetics
- 11 Characterizations of exchangeable partitions and random discrete distributions by deletion properties
- 12 Applying coupon-collecting theory to computer-aided assessments
- 13 Colouring and breaking sticks: random distributions and heterogeneous clustering
- 14 The associated random walk and martingales in random walks with stationary increments
- 15 Diffusion processes and coalescent trees
- 16 Three problems for the clairvoyant demon
- 17 Homogenization for advection-diffusion in a perforated domain
- 18 Heavy traffic on a controlled motorway
- 19 Coupling time distribution asymptotics for some couplings of the Lévy stochastic area
- 20 Queueing with neighbours
- 21 Optimal information feed
- 22 A dynamical-system picture of a simple branching-process phase transition
- Index
Summary
It is a great honour to have been given this fine collection, and I am most grateful to the Editors and to my friends who have contributed to it. It is poor thanks to inflict on them this self-centred account, and I have tried to mitigate the offence by limiting it to a particular decade, which begins as a new student arrives at Pembroke College in Cambridge to start a degree course in mathematics, and ends with him as a professor in the new University of Sussex. It was obviously a crucial time in my own mathematical life, but it happens also to have been a very interesting period in the development of probability theory in Britain, in which I was fortunate to play a junior part.
With little reluctance I have restricted myself to the mathematical aspects of my life. The reader will seek in vain for any details of my transition from a schoolboy to a happy husband soon to be a proud father; the latter conditions have proved lasting.
Of course the story goes back long before 1957. It might be said to have started in about 1920, when Charles Kingman, a miner on the small but prosperous North Somerset coalfield, summoned his two sons William and Frank for a serious talk. Charles came of a family of Mendip villagers, his grandfather having been the carter of Ston Easton.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Probability and Mathematical GeneticsPapers in Honour of Sir John Kingman, pp. 17 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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