Ray Solomonoff

Ray Solomonoff, born in Cleveland, Ohio on July 25, 1926 and died on December 7, 2009, was an American mathematician who invented algorithmic probability and his General Theory of Inductive Inference, also called universal inductive inference, and who was a founder of algorithmic information theory. He studied physics at the University of Chicago, where Rudolf Carnap and Enrico Fermi were among his teachers, and he was one of the ten invitees to the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. In 1956 he circulated the first report on non semantic machine learning, and in 1960 he described algorithmic probability, the result that launched Kolmogorov complexity. He worked largely independently through his own one man company, Oxbridge Research, formed in 1970, with periods at institutions including MIT. In 2003 he was the first recipient of the Kolmogorov Award.