Emil Gumbel was born on July 18, 1891 in Munich, Germany, the son of a Jewish banker. He became an ardent pacifist during World War I. Gumbel became famous as a historian and a statistician of the political murders in the early Weimar Republic.
In mathematics, Gumbel is best known for his work in reliability theory and order statistics. He is particularly remembered for his work on extreme value theory. The type 1 extreme value distribution is also known as the Gumbel distribution in his honor.
Gumbel died on September 10, 1966.