Harold hotel ling biography of martin

He was associate professor of mathematics at Stanford University from until , a member of the faculty of Columbia University from until , and a professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from until his death. A street in Chapel Hill bears his name. In , he received the North Carolina Award for contributions to science.

Hotelling is known to statisticians because of Hotelling's T-squared distribution which is a generalization of the Student's t-distribution in multivariate setting, and its use in statistical hypothesis testing and confidence regions. He also introduced canonical correlation analysis.

Harold Hotelling was a man of many interests and talents.

At the beginning of his statistical career Hotelling came under the influence of R. Fisher , whose Statistical Methods for Research Workers had "revolutionary importance", according to Hotelling's review. Hotelling was able to maintain professional relations with Fisher, despite the latter's temper tantrums and polemics. Hotelling suggested that Fisher use the English word " cumulants " for Thiele 's Danish "semi-invariants".

Fisher's emphasis on the sampling distribution of a statistic was extended by Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson with greater precision and wider applications, which Hotelling recognized.

Harold Hotelling's contribution to the economics of exhaustible resources is considered groundbreaking in the history of economic thought.

Hotelling sponsored refugees from European anti-semitism and Nazism, welcoming Henry Mann and Abraham Wald to his research group at Columbia. While at Hotelling's group, Wald developed sequential analysis and statistical decision theory , which Hotelling described as "pragmatism in action". In the United States, Hotelling is known for his leadership of the statistics profession, in particular for his vision of a statistics department at a university, which convinced many universities to start statistics departments.

Hotelling was known for his leadership of departments at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina. Hotelling has a crucial place in the growth of mathematical economics; several areas of active research were influenced by his economics papers.