Bayesian statistics at Princeton University, with a visit to the grave of John Von Neumann

I was very pleased to have had the opportunity to present a talk regarding Bayesian models of ordinal data at Princeton University, on Tuesday, March 5, 2019. An abstract of the talk is here, and the published article on which the talk was based is here.

A big thanks to Dr. Ting Qian who orchestrated the visit wonderfully. The lecture hall was packed, with people standing outside the door in the hall, in no small part due to Ting's organization of a popular statistics series. Big thanks also to the staff who made arrangements. And, of course, thanks to the many people who took time to meet with me while I was there.

I took a few hours the next morning to visit some special places in Princeton. In particular, I visited the graves of John Von Neumann and Kurt Godel. Von Neumann made contributions to Monte Carlo methods at the foundation of MCMC methods in Bayesian analysis.

Here's a snapshot of Von Neumann's grave stone:

And only a few feet away, Godel's grave stone:

After visiting the cemetery, I went to the Princeton University Art Museum and came across this painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. It's titled, "From a New Jersey Weekend II," painted in 1941.

It was an interesting coincidence that both O'Keeffe's and my visits featured two notable grave stones.

Here's a map of the Princeton Cemetery, with a marker at the approximate location of the graves of Von Neumann and Godel.


For posts about the book, DBDA2E, visiting other famous grave sites, see this post and its links to previous posts.