Harold Hotelling

Harold Hotelling (Fulda, Minnesota, September 29, 1895 – December 26, 1973) was a mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist. His name is known to all statisticians because of Hotelling's T-square distribution and its use in statistical hypothesis testing and confidence regions. He also introduced canonical correlation analysis, and is the eponym of Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics. He was ... more

Harold Hotelling (Fulda, Minnesota, September 29, 1895 – December 26, 1973) was a mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist. His name is known to all statisticians because of Hotelling's T-square distribution and its use in statistical hypothesis testing and confidence regions. He also introduced canonical correlation analysis, and is the eponym of Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics. He was Associate Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University from 1927, a member of the faculty of Columbia University from 1931 until 1946, and a Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1946 until his death. A street in Chapel Hill bears his name. In 1972 he received the North Carolina Award for contributions to science. The historian Stephen Stigler has said that it was because of Hotelling's suggestion in a letter to R.A. Fisher that cumulants are known by their now-standard name. His... less