Hey @Galen. What projects are you doing, of late? Sankey diagrams of random walks :-)
Robert B. Ash was a gifted writer who authored books on number theory, complex analysis, real analysis, probability theory and information theory. Perhaps he is famous for his book on measure and probability theory. I always liked his books for they were rigorous, well-detailed and comprehensive but perhaps it was the collection of standard problems with solutions that was able to made a huge fan base.
He was in the faculty of University of Illinois. Sadly, as I happened to see yesterday, he passed away due to an unfortunate accident while taking walk in April of 2015.
> Instead of focusing on authoring research papers, Mr. Ash spent time teaching and writing 13 textbooks on a "staggeringly wide" array of topics ranging from statistics to algebraic number theory, Diamond said.
> "He would take up the study of something and write a textbook on it," Diamond said. "His books weren't at the forefront of research, but they were at the level that college students and graduate students might learn from."
@User1865345 Ha! My blog does become a dumping ground for miscellaneous topics... Lots of probabilistic forecasting and discrete event simulation right now.