Leo Breiman was born in New York City on January 27, 1928. His
parents and he migrated five years later to San Francisco where he began
school. During Leo's junior high school years, his family moved again, to Los
Angeles. Leo graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1945 and entered the
California Institute of Technology, from which he graduated four years later
with a major in physics. He earned his Master's Degree in mathematics at
Columbia University in 1950 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of
California, Berkeley in 1954. Leo has broad ranging scientific and mathematical
interests, including information theory and the theory of gambling. He has been
involved in applications coming from studies of automobile traffic, air quality
and toxic substance recognition. He is the author of a celebrated graduate text
on probability theory, is one of four authors of Classification and
Regression Trees and its associated CARTR software and has also
written two other books. With Jerome Friedman, Leo developed the ACE
(alternating conditional expectations) algorithm by which nonlinear
relationships between the dependent variable and predictor variables in
regression are described. He is the originator of “bagging” and
“arcing,” both computerintensive approaches to
classification that are of much current interest.
¶ Leo's professional positions have included being on the faculty of
the Department of Mathematics at UCLA, an independent consultant for 13 years
and Professor of Statistics and founding Director of the Statistical Computing
Facility at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he has had
visiting positions at Stanford and at Yale. For his many contributions, Leo has
been honored by Fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and in
the American Statistical Association. He is an elected member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Berkeley Citation from the
University of California. The interests and accomplishments of Leo Breiman
extend outside the areas of professional statistician and probabilist. He was a
waiter in the Catskills, a dishwasher in the Merchant Marine, a trekker into
the heart of rainforest Africa, an active father to many children from a small
agrarian Mexican village, a member and President of the Santa Monica School
Board, the architect of his stunning home and an accomplished sculptor. Leo and
his wife, Mary Lou, reside in Berkeley. He is the father of two daughters,
Rebecca and Jessica.