Google on Sunday paid tribute to Japanese statistician Hirotugu Akaike with a doodle on his 90th birth anniversary.
Born on November 5, 1927, he is known for the formulation of, “Akaike Information Criterion”, which helps in deriving the accurate variables to select the best statistical model “from a set of options by measuring how close the results are to the (hypothetical) truth.”
The doodle portrays Dr. Akaike against “a Google-inspired approximation of functions, parameters, and their respective curves,” Google said in its blog.
In a post-war Japan, Dr. Akaike aspired to work on problems that were unique to his country and contribute to its re-construction. He used the fundamental concepts of information mathematics to analyze the processing of sericultural products, cement kiln controls, and thermal electric power plant controls to provide a breakthrough solution to the model selection problem.
As a result, the AIC is widely used today as a practical guideline for the selection of statistical models in a wide range of areas including medicine, epidemiology, biology, control engineering, economics, environmentology, geophysics and social sciences, as well as the fields of mathematics and statistics, according to his citation for the Kyoto Prize 2006.
Dr. Akaike is a recipient of many awards including Kyoto Prize in 2006, Purple Ribbon Medal and the Asahi Prize. He passed away on August 4, 2009, at the age of 82.
The doodle is visible to users in India, Japan, New Zealand, Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Cuba, Estonia, Greece, Iceland, Portugal and Sweden
