Homepage of Piet Groeneboom
Personal
Emeritus professor of Statistics at the Faculty EWI (Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science) of the University of Technology, Delft.
Member of DIAM (Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics) at Delft University.
Book with co-author Geurt Jongbloed (published December, 2014),
see:
Nonparametric Estimation under Shape Constraints
Review of the book in Mathematical Reviews of MathSciNet of the American Mathematical Society:
review.
Annotations and corrections for the book are listed in Annotations for book.
Retirement speech: Summa Cogitatio.
The second part of my book "Information Bounds and Nonparametric Maximum Likelihood Estimation" (Birkhäuser, 1992) with co-author Jon Wellner
is based on summer lectures I gave in Stanford in 1990.
The Stanford lectures are given here: Stanford lectures.
Since 2020 I am columnist of Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde (NAW).
The columns are (so far):
The Netherlands in Times of Corona (in Dutch)
The Statistics Scene
Two cultures
En flagrant délit (with comments)
The rejoinder to comments on my column is given here
Chernoff's distribution and the bootstrap
Monty Hall, Marilyn vos Savant en Fermat
Wortel min 1 bestaat niet!
Danse Macabre
Chernoff's law and Jante's law
Buffon's needles and noodles
Convex Hulls
Chat (with Lambert Meertens)
On August 6 and 7, 2013, I delivered the Wald lectures at the Joint Statistical Meeting in Montreal:
Wald lecture 1
Wald lecture 2
A long time ago (2009) I wrote (in Dutch) several blogs on
the so-called Deventer murder case, in particular
Second conversation between Jan and Willem
and
Ernest Louwes and the media
Since someone recently accused me of being one of those
idiots/conspiracy theorists believing in the innocence of Louwes,
I read these blogs again, and I must say that I am still fully
behind them. The writing style might suggest that I am not
serious, but that is just my writing style, I am very serious
about this.
One could ask me: "Aren't you messing with things that are of no
concern to you?", to which I answer nowadays: "An intellectual
always messes with things that are of no concern to him". This
beautiful line is not mine, but is what Jean-Paul Sartre answered
on the same question in a documentary on him I recently watched.
A request for re-opening the case was issued by Louwes'
lawyer Geert-Jan Knoops at the Dutch supreme court on October 26,
2022, see PRESS RELEASE | | Regarding submission of a review request in the Deventer murder case.
The philosopher Ton Derksen wrote a book on the Deventer
murder case ("Lies about Louwes"), in Dutch, which is out of
sale now. But he wrote a new book "The Deventer character
murder" (in Dutch, publisher Noordhoek, Gorredijk, 2023), with still more material exonerating Louwes.
As rightly remarked by Ton Derksen, all the lying (by the prosecution) about
the relevant events (recently also confirmed by the
cold-case team, as pointed out in Knoops' request for re-opening), sets the case
against Louwes apart from the Lucia de Berk case, where a
nonsensical computation of a probability of one in 342 million
played a major role. A paper on the latter case by Richard Gill,
Peter de Jong and myself appeared in the American journal
"Chance": Elementary
Statistics on Trial—The Case of Lucia de Berk
Unfortunately there is a powerful lobby of people, of
which the journalist Bas Haan is one of the key figures, making
podcasts and even a movie on the case, seemingly convinced of
Louwes' guilt. I understand that they fear financial loss from
the new book by Ton Derksen. Chasing "criminals" is big business,
as became recently also clear in the Lucy Letby case. In spite of the convincing
research of the cold case team on the lying and manipulation of
relevant material, attorney general Diederik Aben has recently advised against new
consideration by the supreme court, because there would not be a "novum".
The novum (or claimed absence of it) is a mighty weapon of the supreme court
against re-openings.
