James Mercer (mathematician)

James Mercer FRS[1] (15 January 1883 – 21 February 1932) was a mathematician, born in Bootle, close to Liverpool, England.[2]

He was educated at University of Manchester, and then University of Cambridge. He became a Fellow, saw active service at the Battle of Jutland in World War I and, after decades of ill health, died in London.

He proved Mercer's theorem, which states that positive-definite kernels can be expressed as a dot product in a high-dimensional space. This theorem is the basis of the kernel trick (applied by Aizerman), which allows linear algorithms to be easily converted into non-linear algorithms.

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Hobson, E. W. (1933). "James Mercer. 1883-1932". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 1 (2): 164–165\. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1933.0016.
2. ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "James Mercer", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews

This article about a United Kingdom mathematician is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

|

* v
* t
* e

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template