Emil Julius Gumbel (18 July 1891, Munich - 10 September 1966, New York City) was a German mathematician and political writer.
Born in Munich, he graduated from the University of Munich shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. He was Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Heidelberg.
Following the murder of a friend, he attended the trial where he saw that the judge completely ignored evidence against the Brown Shirts Nazis. Horrified, he ardently investigated many similar political murders that had occurred and published his findings in Four Years of Political Murder in 1922. In 1928, he published Causes of Political Murder and also tried to create a political group to counter Nazism. When he died in 1966, Gumbel's papers were made a part of The Emil J. Gumbel Collection, Political Papers of an Anti-Nazi Scholar in Weimar and Exile. These papers include reels of microfilm that document his activities against the Nazis.[1] [2]
Gumbel was also one of the 33 signers of the 1932 Dringender Appell.
Along with Leonard Tippett and Ronald Fisher, he pioneered the mathematical field of extreme value theory. The Gumbel distribution was named after him.
