Emil Julius Gumbel (18 July 1891, in Munich – 10 September 1966, in New York City) was a German mathematician and political writer. Gumbel specialised in mathematical statistics and, along with Leonard Tippett and Ronald Fisher, was instrumental in the development of extreme value theory, which has practical applications in many fields, including engineering and finance. In 1958, Gumbel published a key book, Statistics of Extremes, in which he derived and analyzed the probability distribution that is now known as the Gumbel distribution in his honor. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Gumbel was considered unusual and highly controversial in German academic circles for his vocal support of left-wing politics and pacifism, and his opposition to Fascism. His influential writings about the politically motivated Feme murders made the case that the Weimar Republic was corruptly anti-leftist and anti-republican. Gumbel publicly opposed the Nazi Party and, in 1932, he was one of the 33 prominent signers of the Urgent Call for Unity. Biography Born to a prominent Jewish family in Württemberg, Gumbel graduated in mathematics from the University of Munich, completing his doctoral thesis on the topic of population statistics shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. After a short period of military service, he was discharged in 1915 on medical grounds and he joined the University of Berlin to work with the prominent Russian statistician Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz. From this time onwards he became much more politically active. He joined the Independent Social Democrat Party (USPD) in 1917, and became a prominent member of the pacifist New Fatherland League which was later renamed the German League for Human Rights (DLM). In January 1918, Gumbel took up a position with the electronics company Telefunken, researching sound transmitter waves, and he continued his political activities with the support of one of the firm's founders, Georg Count von Arco, a prominent member of the human rights movement. In 1922, Gumbel became Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Heidelberg, where he soon found that combining academic work with politics was much more controversial, resulting in protests by students and faculty members, who were mostly right-wing, and strong criticism in the right-wing press. Among the Nazis' most-hated public intellectuals, Gumbel was forced out of his position in Heidelberg in 1932. He then moved to France, where he taught at the École libre des hautes études in Paris, and in Lyon, as