Per Erik Rutger Martin-Löf (; ; born 8 May 1942) is a Swedish logician, philosopher, and mathematical statistician. He is internationally renowned for his work on the foundations of probability, statistics, mathematical logic, and computer science. Since the late 1970s, Martin-Löf's publications have been mainly in logic. In philosophical logic, Martin-Löf has wrestled with the philosophy of logical consequence and judgment, partly inspired by the work of Brentano, Frege, and Husserl. In mathematical logic, Martin-Löf has been active in developing intuitionistic type theory as a constructive foundation of mathematics; Martin-Löf's work on type theory has influenced computer science. Until his retirement in 2009, Per Martin-Löf held a joint chair for Mathematics and Philosophy at Stockholm University. His brother Anders Martin-Löf is now emeritus professor of mathematical statistics at Stockholm University; the two brothers have collaborated in research in probability and statistics. The research of Anders and Per Martin-Löf has influenced statistical theory, especially concerning exponential families, the expectation-maximization method for missing data, and model selection. Per Martin-Löf received his PhD in 1970 from Stockholm University, under Andrey Kolmogorov. Martin-Löf is an enthusiastic bird-watcher; his first scientific publication was on the mortality rates of ringed birds. Randomness and Kolmogorov complexity In 1964 and 1965, Martin-Löf studied in Moscow under the supervision of Andrei N. Kolmogorov. He wrote a 1966 article The definition of random sequences that gave the first suitable definition of a random sequence. Earlier researchers such as Richard von Mises had attempted to formalize the notion of a test for randomness in order to define a random sequence as one that passed all tests for randomness; however, the precise notion of a randomness test was left vague. Martin-Löf's key insight was to use the theory of computation to define formally the notion of a test for randomness. This contrasts with the idea of randomness in probability; in that theory, no particular element of a sample space can be said to be random. Martin-Löf randomness has since been shown to admit many equivalent characterizations — in terms of compression, randomness tests, and gambling — that bear little outward resemblance to the original definition, but each of which satisfies our intuitive notion of properties that random sequences ought to have: random sequences should be incompressible, they should pass statistical tests for randomness, and it should be impossible to make money betting on them. The existence of these multiple definitions of Martin-Löf