Frank Wilcoxon

Frank Wilcoxon ( born September 2, 1892 in County Cork, Ireland, † November 18, 1965 in Tallahassee, Florida ) was an American chemist who dealt in particular with the development of methods for statistical analysis of scientific data. He was known by two new statistical tests that have been named after him.

Life

Frank Wilcoxon was born in 1892 as the son of American parents in Ireland and grew up in the small town of Catskill in Greene County in the U.S. state of New York. He graduated from the Pennsylvania Military College, which he finished in 1917 with a B.Sc. degree. Four years later, he earned a M.Sc. degree in chemistry at Rutgers University, in 1924 he received his doctorate from Cornell University in physical chemistry.

From 1925 to 1941 he was employed at the Boyce Thompson searchingly Institute for Plant Research. He then moved for a short time for Atlas Powder Company, before he worked from 1943 for the American Cyanamid and dealt with the statistical analysis of scientific data. The most important of his 70 publications appeared in 1945 under the title "Individual Comparisons by Ranking Methods" in the journal Biometrics Bulletin. He described it two new statistical tests known as the Wilcoxon rank sum test and Wilcoxon signed - rank test and up to the present are among the most commonly used non-parametric tests for comparison of two samples.

In 1957, he retired at the age of 65 years from the firm and worked part-time as a consultant for the Boyce Thompson Institute and a lecturer at the Department of Statistics, Florida State University. He died eight years later in Tallahassee to a heart attack.