Biographical Memoirs Volume 87 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Harold Hotelling
Harold Hotelling
Pages 220-233
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From page 221... ...
Upon leaving Princeton, he took a position as research associate at the Food Research Institute of Stanford University, from where he moved to the Stanford Mathematics Department as an associate professor in 1927. It was during his Stanford period that he began to focus on the two fields-statistics and economics -- in which he would do his life's work.
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As a result, Hotelling left Columbia for Chapel Hill, where he quickly built up a strong Department of Mathematical Statistics. Hotelling married Floy Tracy in 1920, and they had two children.
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. (Incidentally and possibly irrelevantly, the uncle of his thesis advisor, Oswald Veblen, was a very well-known though highly unorthodox economist, Thorstein Veblen.)
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, and Anthony Downs (Downs, 1957) , the idea entered political science as the median voter theorem and has remained a staple of formal political theory to this day.
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The second broke ground new to the general economics profession, but it turned out that its basic ideas had been anticipated by Evgenii Slutsky, the Russian probability theorist, in an Italian actuarial journal 21 years earlier. These papers were the basis of his Columbia course in mathematical economics, at least in 1941-1942.
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From page 226... ...
Since the entrance free is relatively small, it is clear that people are probably getting satisfaction from the park well in excess of the fee charged. Hotelling noted that people usually have to travel considerable distances and thereby incur significant money costs.
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From page 227... ...
. Of it, Richard Savage, in his 1953 "Bibliography of Nonparametric Statistics," writes that "papers related to nonparametric problems were published in the nineteenth century, but the true beginning of the subject may be taken as 1936, the year in which Hotelling and Pabst published their paper on rank correlation." Again, invariance considerations are central and are used to motivate the reduction to the ranks of the observations.
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From page 228... ...
In the same vein, after spending six months with Fisher in Rothamstead, Hotelling published two survey papers in JASA: "British Statistics and Statisticians Today" (1930) and "Recent Improvements in Statistical Inference" (1931)
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. He concluded the paper by recommending that "organization of the teaching of statistical methods should be centralized and should provide also for the joint functions of research and advice and service needed by others in the institution and possibly outside it, regarding the statistical aspects of their problems of designing experiments and interpreting observations." In the following decades, the issues raised by these two papers were hotly debated in universities across the country, but in most cases were gradually settled along the lines suggested by Hotelling, with independent departments of statistics offering not only centralized teaching of the subject but also consulting services to fill the needs of researchers in other departments.
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Drury. Included in the report The Economics of Public Recreation: An Economic Study of the Monetary Evaluation of Recreation in the National Parks, 1949.
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40:577-616. 1933 Analysis of a complex of statistical variables into principal components.
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Rank correlation and tests of significance involving no assumption of normality.
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. 1957 The relations of the newer multivariate statistical methods to factor analysis.
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