I don't to defend the other argument (which I think is just silly), but
Kolmogorov was by no means a "statistician"--his interest in probability
was from a mathematician's point of view. This is, of course, assuming
that by statistician we mean something more modern than existed in the
30s--someone collecting and processing raw numerical data, and
developing general methodology for such activity. Statistics has evolved
into an independent science (more-or-less) precisely *because of* all
the major contributions its practitioners had made to mathematics.
> > Gibbs and Heaviside contributed to vectors, and Einstein had something
> > to do with tensors, but these are about the last examples of original
> > mathematical work coming from the field of physics.
>
> What about Berry's work on the Riemann zeta function and quantum
> mechanics? The JWKB method for asymptotics of the solutions of
> differential equations, in which J was a seismologist (1924) and W, K
> and B were quantum theorists (1926). Then there's catastrophe theory and
> chaos theory (Kolmogorov again, inm the KAM Theorem)
...And the whole quantum group headed by Dirac. I think the entire
argument as stated by James Landau was self-serving and circular. If we
only define mathematics as geometry, than we would have to dismiss most
of the XIXth and XXth century mathematicians as non-practicioners of
mathematics.
VS-)