James Mercer (mathematician)
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James Mercer (January 15, 1883 – February 21, 1932) was a mathematician, born in Bootle, close to Liverpool, England.
He was educated at Manchester University, and then Cambridge. He became a Fellow, saw active service at the Battle of Jutland in World War I, and after decades of suffering ill health died in London, England.
He proved Mercer's theorem, which states that positive definite kernels can be expressed as a dot product in a high-dimensional space. This theorem is the basis of the kernel trick (applied by Aizerman), which allows linear algorithms to be easily converted into non-linear algorithms.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- O'Connor, John J. & Robertson, Edmund F., “James Mercer”, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
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