James Mercer (January 15,1883 – February 21,1932) was a mathematician, born in Bootle, close to Liverpool, England.
He was educated at Manchester University, and then Cambridge. He became a Fellow, saw active service at the Battle of Jutland in World War I, and after decades of suffering ill health died in London, England.
He proved Mercer's theorem, which states that positive definite kernels can be expressed as a dot product in a high-dimensional space. This theorem is the basis of the kernel trick (applied by Aizerman), which allows linear algorithms to be easily converted into non-linear algorithms.
James Mercer (February 26, 1736 - October 31, 1793) (also know as William James Mercer) was born in Virginia at Malborough plantation on February 26, 1736. He was the son of John Mercer and Catherine Mason Mercer. He graduated from the College of William and Mary about 1755 and became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1765. In 1774, he was a member of the general assembly. He was an American lawyer and jurist who served as a delegate for Virginia to the Continental Congress in 1779.
He was appointed a judge of the general court in 1780 and became a judge on the first Court of Appeals as a result. In 1789, he was appointed as a member of the reorganized Court of Appeals. He remained on the bench of that court until his death in Richmond on October 31, 1793.
Brother of George Mercer and John Francis Mercer. Father of Charles Fenton Mercer.
James Russell Mercer (born December 26 1970 in Honolulu, Hawaii) is an American guitarist and indie rock musician. He attended high school in both England and Germany; in an interview in The Guardian he stated that he lived in England from 1985-1990, and that the family moved there because his father was in the Air Force .
In his early 20s, Mercer belonged to a group called Blue Roof Dinner; then in 1992 he became a founding member of the Flakes. In 1997 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Mercer began The Shins}} as a side-project. In 1999, the Flakes (by then called [[Flake Music) disbanded and Mercer and the other band members focused completely on The Shins, of which he is still the [[vocalist">lead singer/songwriter. In 2002, the band relocated to Portland, Oregon, the given location stated on the band's official MySpace page blank">http://myspace.com/theshins. Mercer named his band _The Shins after the family in the musical The Music Man, a favorite of Mercer's father.
Musical influences he has mentioned include The Smiths, The Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Beach Boys and The Jesus and Mary Chain.
Mercer also sang backup vocals on the tracks "Florida", "Missed The Boat" and "We've Got Everything" on Modest Mouse's 2007 album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. On the Shins' 2007 album Wincing the Night Away, the booklet credits Mercer with playing "guitar, bass, synthesizer, ukulele, banjo, cat piano, percussion, beat and MIDI programming."
Mercer is known to play a worn yellow Gibson Les Paul Double cut faded (guitar).
