Something to do with probability

Abstract

I’m very pleased to write an editorial for IRRJ. It’s great to see it into its second year of publication. It’s a worthy successor to the Information Retrieval Journal that Paul Kantor and I started many years ago. In the history of information retrieval, probabilistic models have a role to play, and in my research career, I have made use of them. The story I’m going to tell here has probability as one of its themes. That statement might make it sound like an abstract theoretical treatise, and I shall start that way, but actually its core is a very human story about the life and death of a colourful but flawed character who made a fortune as an entrepreneur, came near to losing it all, seemed to overcome potential disaster against the odds in 2024, and then in the same year died the most ridiculously unlikely death. I had a brief but interesting encounter with him in 2001.