Person: Hotelling, Harold
Harold Hotelling was an American mathematical statistician who wrote important papers on economics as well as on statistics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Now the year Harold was born marks the beginning of automobile production in the United States and soon it became clear that automobiles were going to replace horses as a means of transport.
- The young Hotelling was an avid reader, making great use of the Seattle Public Library.
- Following the award of his doctorate, Hotelling was appointed as a junior associate at the Food Research Institute attached to Stanford University.
- The year 1931 was significant for Hotelling in another way for, in that year, he left Stanford University to take up a professorship in the Economics Department of Columbia University.
- Hotelling then met Susanna Porter Edmonson who was a student in a statistics course he was teaching.
- Hotelling was passionately against all that Hitler stood for and strongly argued for the United States to enter the war long before the country did.
- Hotelling pressed Columbia University to set up an independent department of statistics with its own permanent staff.
- Hotelling received an offer from the University of North Carolina to start a statistics programme there.
- Hotelling, therefore, left Columbia in 1946 to start up a Department of Mathematical Statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Hotelling drew together a group of statisticians at the Institute, a list of whom reads like a role call of honour.
- In creating a world centre of excellence in mathematical statistical research Hotelling surely had no equal.
- Now Hotelling wrote, as we have already indicated, important papers on economics as well as on statistics.
- Finally, we should also examine Hotelling's ideas on teaching mathematics and statistics.
Born 29 September 1895, Fulda, Minnesota, USA. Died 26 December 1973, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Usa
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
