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Sir Harold Jeffreys (22 April 1891 - 18 March 1989) was a mathematician, statistician, geophysicist, and astronomer.
He was born in Fatfield, County Durham, England. He studied at Armstrong College in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, then part of the University of Durham but later to become the University of Newcastle. He then went to St John's College, Cambridge and became a fellow in 1914. At Cambridge University he taught mathematics, then geophysics and finally became the Plumian Professor of Astronomy.
He married another mathematician and physicist, Bertha Swirles (1903-1999), in 1940 and together they wrote Methods of Mathematical Physics.
Among his other contributions was a Bayesian approach to probability, and the idea that the Earth's planetary core was liquid. He was knighted in 1953.
References
- Maria Carla Galavotti. "Harold Jeffreys' Probabilistic Epistemology: Between Logicism And Subjectivism". British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 54(1):43-57 (March 2003). (A review of Jeffreys' approach to probability; includes remarks on R.A. Fisher, Frank P. Ramsey, and Bruno de Finetti. Also online: [1] (http://www3.oup.co.uk/phisci/hdb/Volume_54/Issue_01/default.html))
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