Harold Hotelling

Harold Hotelling (born 29 September 1895 in Fulda, Minnesota; † 26 December 1973) was an American statistician and economist.

Hotelling spent most of his childhood in Seattle. After the bachelor's degree in journalism in 1919, he finished in 1921 a degree in mathematics from the University of Washington with the academic degree of Master. In 1924 he received his doctorate at Princeton University, after which he worked as a scientist at Stanford University. Between 1931 and 1946 he studied at Columbia University before he co-founded the first Department of Statistics in the United States at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There he taught until his death.

Hotelling is considered one of the most important economists and statisticians of the early 20th century. In particular, in the foundation of the multivariate statistics, his influence was enormous, among other things, he led in the 1930s, the concepts of a canonical correlation analysis and principal component analysis. Named after him is Hotelling's T -square distribution.

In 1972 he was awarded the North Carolina Award.

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