Robert McCallum Blumenthal

Robert "Bob" McCallum Blumenthal (7 February 1931, Chicago – 8 November 2012) was an American mathematician, specializing in probability theory. He is known for Blumenthal's zero-one law.

Biography He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University in 1956 under Gilbert Hunt with thesis An Extended Markov Property.

At the time Hunt was in the process of developing the relationships between Markov processes and potential theory to be published in a monumental work in three installments in 1957 and 1958. This subject was to become one of the main topics of research in probability for the next 20–25 years. The class of processes for which Hunt developed his theory came to be called Hunt processes in later years. ... Already in his thesis Bob had established two of the basic principles of this topic: the strong Markov property (also established independently and more or less simultaneously by Dynkin and Yushkevich in the Soviet Union) and the quasi-left continuity of the sample paths of the process. In addition, his thesis contained what became known as the Blumenthal zero-one law.