James Mercer

James Mercer FRS[1] (15 January 1883 – 21 February 1932) was a mathematician, born in Bootle, close to Liverpool, England. [2]

He was educated at University of Manchester, and then University of 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.
References

^ h., E. W. (1933). "James Mercer. 1883-1932". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 1 (2): 164. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1933.0016. edit
^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "James Mercer", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.