Glenn Shafer

Glenn Shafer was born in his grandmother’s farmhouse near Caney, Kansas in 1946. Both a farm boy and a bookworm, Glenn attended Princeton University as scholarship student, then spent a year teaching geometry in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan before completing a doctoral degree in statistics back at Princeton in 1973. His subsequent academic career has been devoted to understanding the logic and the history of probability and statistical inference. He is best known for his 1976 book, A Mathematical Theory of Evidence, which launched the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. In recent decades, he has collaborated with Vladimir Vovk on a new mathematical theory of probability, which he has christened game-theoretic probability. He is now completing a book on game-theoretic statistics.

In 2022, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, five of Glenn’s colleagues published a biography of Glenn in the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (Volume 141, pages 5-10).

Glenn retired from teaching at Rutgers University in 2025. He now devotes his spare time to clubs devoted to raising local awareness of the accelerating climate catastrophe.