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Harold HotellingAmerican economist and statistician
Date of Birth: 29.09.1895
Country:  USA |
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Biography of Harold Hotelling
Harold Hotelling was an American economist and statistician who made significant contributions to the field of statistics. He is best known for his work on the t-square distribution and canonical correlation analysis.
Early Career and Influences
Hotelling began his career as a mathematical statistician and prominent economist. He held the position of mathematics lecturer at Stanford University from 1927 until 1931. He then moved on to work at Columbia University from 1931 to 1946. In 1946, Hotelling became a professor of mathematical statistics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he remained until his death. In honor of his contributions, one of the city's streets was named after him.
During the early years of his career, Hotelling was heavily influenced by the works of R.A. Fisher, particularly his book "Statistical Methods for Research Workers," which he considered revolutionary. Despite Fisher's difficult character, Hotelling managed to establish professional connections with him. Hotelling was the one who demonstrated the equivalence of Fisher's term "cumulants" with the "semi-invariants" used by Thorvald N. Thiele.
Contributions to Statistics and Economics
Hotelling actively assisted refugees fleeing European anti-Semitism and Nazism. Notable individuals who found refuge in his scientific group included Henry Mann and Abraham Wald. It was through his collaboration with Hotelling that Wald developed the concept of sequential analysis and statistical decision theory, which Hotelling described as "pragmatism in action."
Hotelling played a significant role in the development of mathematical economics, and his work had a profound impact on various scientific fields. At the University of Washington, he was convinced to shift his focus from pure mathematics to mathematical economics by renowned mathematician Eric Temple Bell. Later, while at Columbia University, Hotelling, in turn, persuaded a young Kenneth Arrow to transition from mathematics and statistics to probability research and more practical applications of mathematics in general economic theory.
Hotelling's name is associated with various laws, including Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics. One of his innovative contributions was the study of non-convex functions, which refer to violations of the convex assumptions in elementary economics. Hotelling demonstrated the benefits of forecasting such processes, which were previously explored at a slower pace.
His subsequent work formed the foundation for several groundbreaking branches of economics, challenging conventional concepts and predicting outcomes in complex scenarios. Hotelling's research not only advanced traditional market economics but also contributed to the analysis of stock processes and even ecological forecasting.
