That Simple Device Already Used by Gauss
Peter Grünwald, J. Rissanen · 2008
www.cwi.nl/~pdg From November 1998 until September 1999, Jorma Rissanen and I met on a regular basis. Here I recall some of our stimulating conversations and some of the work that we did together. This work, based almost exclusively on a single page of [12], was left unfinished and has never been published, but it has indirectly had a profound impact on my career. 1 Meet Jorma Rissanen I first met Jorma in November 1998. I had just obtained my Ph.D. in Amsterdam and started a postdoc at Stanford University. These were exciting times: it was at the height of the dot-com boom, and Stanford was right in the middle of it. Since my thesis was all about the MDL Principle, I had suggested that Jorma and I could meet in person during my stay in California. Jorma replied that he would like to. I was delighted, honored but also a bit worried, since I had been forewarned that Jorma was not your “usual ” kind of scientist... San Francisco, Category Theory and Statistics I found that, while Jorma was not one for polite small talk, he did like having lots of beer with a small circle of academic