Thomas Royen
| Thomas Royen | |
|---|---|
| Born | Thomas Royen 6 July 1947 Frankfurt am Main, Germany |
| Residence | Schwalbach am Taunus, Germany |
| Citizenship | Germany |
| Fields | Mathematics, Statistics |
| Alma mater |
University of Frankfurt University of Freiburg Technical University Dortmund (PhD) |
| Thesis | On Convergence Against Stable Laws (1975) |
| Known for | Proof of Gaussian correlation inequality |
Thomas Royen (born July 6, 1947 in Frankfurt am Main) is a retired German professor of statistics who has been affiliated with the University of Applied Sciences Bingen. Studying at the universities of Frankfurt, Freiburg, and Dortmund, he worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a biometrician before becoming a professor. Having been eluded by fame and recognition during his professional life, he rose to prominence in 2017 for a relative simple proof of Gaussian correlation inequality he had discovered in 2014.
Royen was born in 1947 to Paul Royen, a professor with the institute for inorganic chemistry at the Goethe University Frankfurt and Elisabeth Royen, also a chemist. From 1966 to 1971, he studied mathematics and physics at his father's university and the University of Freiburg. After graduating, he worked as a tutor at the University of Freiburg, before transferring to the Technical University of Dortmund for his doctoral thesis. After attaining his PhD in 1975 with a thesis called Über die Konvergenz gegen stabile Gesetze (On Convergence Against Stable Laws), he worked as a wissenschaftlicher Assistent at Dortmund University's institute for statistics. In 1977, Royen started working as a biometrician for the pharmaceutical company Hoechst AG. From 1979 to 1985, he worked at the company's own educational facility teaching mathematics and statistics. Starting in 1985 until becoming an emeritus in 2010, he taught statistics and mathematics at the small University of Applied Sciences Bingen in Rhineland-Palatinate. Married with children, Royen lives in Schwalbach am Taunus. Royen worked mainly on probability distributions, in particular multivariate chi-square and gamma distributions, to improve some frequently used statistical test procedures. Nearly the half of his circa 30 publications were written in the age of over sixty. Because he was sometimes annoyed about contradictory reviews and in a few cases also about the total incompetence of a referee, he decided in later years, independent from any further career, to publish his papers on the online platform arXiv.org and sometimes in a less renowned Indian journal to fulfil, at least formally, the condition of a peer review. In 2014, after his retirement, he discovered by means of the Laplace transform of the multivariate gamma distribution a relative simple proof for the Gaussian correlation inequality, a problem not completely solved since being formulated in the 1950s. His paper with the title A simple proof of the Gaussian correlation conjecture extended to multivariate gamma distributions is found in the arXiv. He sent a copy of his proof to an acquainted American mathematician, who was very interested in this problem for 30 years, who confirmed its legitimacy and helped him transform it into LaTeX. When they sent it to other reputed mathematicians though, they quickly dismissed the proof's authenticity. Due to this, his proof went ignored by the scientific community, until in late 2015, two Polish probabilists discovered and republished it giving credit to Royen in order to popularize his proof. In July 2015 Royen put a further paper in the arXiv containing among other theorems also a better version of his proof, supplemented for further multivariate gamma distributions by a subsequent paper in 2016. In early 2017, Quanta Magazine published a story about him, after which he gained academic and public recogniton for his proof.
...
Wikipedia