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Japanese statistician Hirotugu Akaike's 90th birthday celebrated with a Google Doodle

By FnF Correspondent | PUBLISHED: 05, Nov 2017, 15:25 pm IST | UPDATED: 06, Nov 2017, 17:17 pm IST

Japanese statistician Hirotugu Akaike's 90th birthday celebrated with a Google Doodle New Delhi: Tech giant Google has today dedicated a doodle on its homepage to Japanese statistician Hirotugu Akaike, on the occasion of his 90th birthday. The 2006 Kyoto Prize awardee was born on November 5, 1927, and is credited with the formulation of the “Akaike information criterion”, which helps predict which statistical model out of many will be the closest to the actual truth.

He has also been a recipient of the Purple Ribbon Medal and the Asahi Prize, which are two of the highest honours in culture and science in Japan. Akaike had died of pneumonia in Tokyo on August 4, 2009 at the age of 81.

And so, to honor Akaike and his work, Google’s homepage today features a portrait of the statistician, against the backdrop of an approximation of functions, parameters, and their respective curves.

The doodle will appear to users in Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Cuba, Estonia, Greece, Iceland, India, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, Portugal and Sweden.

Google mentions in its blog, that in the early 1950s, Akaike questioned the accuracy of statistical models and proposed that someone should measure the measurers since each variable would have an impact on the outcome. More than two decades of research later, he presented the answer as a simple equation known as the Akaike Information Criterion. With AIC, analysts select a model from a set of options by measuring how close the results are to the (hypothetical) truth.

For Dr Akaike, experience was core to creativity, writes Google on its blog. To get ‘a direct feel of random vibrations,’ for example, he bought a scooter and rode it around Mount Fuji. This first-hand experience helped him differentiate between the vibrations of riding on normal and heavily-trucked roads.
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