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James Mercer

James Mercer (January 15,1883 - February 21,1932) was a mathematician, born in Bootle, Liverpool, England.

He was educated at Manchester University, and then Cambridge.

He proved Mercer's theorem, which states that positive definite kernelss 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. For example, see support vector machine. Mercer died in London, England.

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