Person: Snedecor, George Waddel
George Waddel Snedecor was an American mathematician and statistician who worked on correlation.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- George Snedecor attended Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn for two years beginning in 1899.
- Let us record at this point that George and Gertrude Snedecor had two sons, Edward Crosier (born in 1914) and James George (born in 1917).
- In 1910 Snedecor left Austin College to take up an appointment in Ann Arbour as a Graduate Assistant in Physics at the University of Michigan.
- In 1913 Snedecor was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Iowa State College and in the following year he was promoted to Associate Professor.
- Certainly up to this time Snedecor had only been involved in teaching statistics and had no publications in the topic.
- Entitled Correlation and Machine Calculation, this became Snedecor's first publication.
- Snedecor recognized that one could not merely talk about the problem from a purely philosophical viewpoint; the question is not what one should do on the basis of a philosophy of knowledge obtained from untenable axioms - but what one should do here and now with the current given question ...
- In 1927 the Mathematics Statistical Service was founded at Iowa State College; it was led by Snedecor and his colleague A E Brandt.
- Academically things were going exceptionally well with Snedecor's student Gertrude Cox completing the first Master's Thesis on statistics at Iowa State in 1931 and, in September of the same year, Snedecor was given charge of the computing services.
- Snedecor, Brandt and Cox were the initial faculty members of the Statistical Laboratory.
- Snedecor retired from his role in the Statistical Laboratory on 30 June 1947.
- Snedecor was appointed professor in the Department of Statistics, serving until 1958.
- Snedecor himself suffered a stroke in February 1968 and was not expected to recover.
- Snedecor received many honours from Iowa State College including an honorary D.Sc. in 1958 and, in 1969, the building at the College which houses the Statistical Laboratory and the Department of Statistics was named Snedecor Hall.
- Snedecor asked William G Cochran to do the revisions for the sixth edition, and Cochran was listed as the second author of the sixth and seventh editions.
- Finally we mention the tribute paid to him by the publication of the book Statistical papers in honor of George W Snedecor (1972).
- Its contributors include friends, former students, and former colleagues of Professor Snedecor - able statisticians who were asked to select their own topics and provide their own scientific refereeing.
- we believe that this collection will be of interest to statisticians and scientists who know Professor Snedecor personally and to those who have become acquainted with him through various editions of his outstanding book, 'Statistical methods'.
- Together, these groups should include nearly every statistician and many scientists in the world, for the impact of George Snedecor's statistical work on many scientific investigations in various fields is indeed worldwide.
Born 20 October 1881, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Died 15 February 1974, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @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
