World Congress at Ruhr University Bochum Stochastics Elite Meets in Bochum
In August, 900 participants will be attending the “Bernoulli-IMS World Congress in Probability and Statistics” on the campus of Ruhr University Bochum.
Bochum rarely hosts so many international celebrities: As many as 900 participants from all over the world have registered for the World Congress on Stochastics. The conference is organized by the scholarly society “Institute of Mathematical Statistics (USA)” and the “Bernoulli Society (Europe)”. It will take place from August 12 to 16, 2024 at Ruhr University Bochum. “This is a huge honor for us and highlights the excellence of Bochum’s researchers in this field,” says Professor Martin Paul, Rector of Ruhr University Bochum. Media representatives are more than welcome.
Predicting extreme events
In addition to exploring the ongoing development of the theoretical foundations of mathematical statistics and probability theory, the lectures will also address a number of highly relevant social issues. These include questions on data science and machine learning, such as the rapid development in the healthcare sector with improved methods for predicting individual risks. In this context, chance plays a role and so does probability theory.
Another key topic is extreme value theory. The idea here is to calculate the probability of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts or heavy rainfall as far in advance as possible and to provide a plausible explanation. Currently, the question is how much more likely such events are due to climate change.
Statistical arguments in case law
Statistical arguments have dramatic relevance in case law. One of the presentations at the conference will address the “Lucia de Berk” case, which has kept the courts in the Netherlands busy for years. Lucia de Berk was a pediatric nurse. At some point, her superiors noticed that a striking number of the unexplained deaths in her clinic occurred during precisely the shifts when she was in charge. Calculations were made to prove that this couldn’t be pure coincidence, and the probabilities were calculated. Based on these calculations, Lucia de Berk was sentenced to life imprisonment for multiple murders. Professor Richard Gill, who will be speaking about this at the conference, has scrutinized these calculations and demonstrated that, on closer inspection and using other statistical models, the suspicious events were nowhere near as improbable as the experts in court assumed. At the end of a long appeal process, which was only possible after a parliamentary decision, Lucia de Berk was finally acquitted.
“There are many other applications that are driven by questions in the natural sciences,” explains organizer Professor Herold Dehling. “We aim to develop models drawn from fields such as biology and physics, for example, and understand them in a mathematical sense.”
Bochum’s unique contribution to this field is the Ising Lecture, named after Ernst Ising, a world-famous mathematical physicist who developed a mathematical model to explain magnetism, which led to thousands of scientific papers. “Only a few people are aware that he went to school on the Ostring road here in Bochum,” explains Professor Peter Eichelsbacher from the conference organization team.