Google doodle celebrates statistician Hirotugu Akaike's birthday

Google on Sunday celebrated the 90th birthday of Japanese statistician Hirotugu Akaike with a doodle on the homepage.

The doodle showed a sketch of Akaike with a graph showing statistical curves and approximations of mathematical functions in the background.

Akaike was born on November 5, 1927 in Japan's Fujinomiya city.

He was a Japanese statistician working in information theory and in early 1970s, he formulated a criterion for model selection - the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), which is now widely used.

The AIC established a new paradigm that bridged the world of data and the world of modeling, thus contributing greatly to the information and statistical sciences.

In 2006, Akaike was awarded the Kyoto Prize for his major contribution to statistical science and modeling in the development of the AIC.

At the age of 81, Akaike died of pneumonia in Tokyo on August 4, 2009.

-ANI