I. J. Bienayme

Our interest in 1. J. Bienayme was kindled by the discovery of his paper of 1845 on simple branching processes as a model for extinction of family names. In this work he announced the key criticality theorem 28 years before it was rediscovered in incomplete form by Galton and Watson (after whom the process was subsequently and erroneously named). Bienayme was not an obscure figure in his time and ...