Title: Mathematical Theory of Evidence
Author: Glenn Shafer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Copyright Date: 1976-03
ISBN: 0691081751
Type: Hardcover
Book condition: Very Good +
Jacket condition: None
Edition: First Edition

Notes: Clean, solid copy with no writing or marks to text noted, other than previous owner's name penned on corner of front flyleaf. No creased page corners. Binding firm, with slight slant to spine. Cover corners are square. Gilt title on spine, slightly dulled. Black buckram boards. No jacket, perhaps as issued. An extremely scarce, out-of-print title.

About the Book

The author was an assistant professor at Princeton University when the book was written. The first paragraph of his preface reads as follows:

"In the spring of 1971, I attended a course on statistical inference taught by Arthur Dempster at Harvard. In the fall of that same year Geoffrey Watson suggested I give a talk expositing Dempster's work on upper and lower probabilities to the Department of Statistics at Princeton. This essay is one of the results of the ensuing effort. It offers a reinterpretation of Dempster's work, a reinterpretation that identifies his "lower probabilities" as epistemic probabilities or degrees of belief, takes the rule for combining such degrees of belief as fundamental, and abandons the idea that they arise as lower bounds over classes of Bayesian probabilities."

Jeff Barnet, one of the computer scientists who introduced the book's theory to the artificial intelligence community in the late 1970s and early 1980s, called the theory "the Dempster-Shafer theory," and this name has stuck.