# Ted Hill (mathematician)

Theodore Preston Hill (born December 28, 1943), professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is an American mathematician specializing mainly in probability theory. He is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (1993), and an Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1999).

## Contributions

Hill discovered what many consider to be the definitive proof of Benford's law. He is also known for his research in the theories of optimal stopping (including secretary problems and prophet inequality problems) and of fair division, in particular the Hill-Beck land division problem.
Hill has attracted widespread attention for a paper on the variability hypothesis, the theory that men exhibit greater variability than women in genetically controlled traits that he wrote with Sergei Tabachnikov. It was accepted but not published by The Mathematical Intelligencer; a later version authored by Hill alone was peer reviewed and accepted by The New York Journal of Mathematics and retracted after publication. A revised version, again authored by Hill alone, was subsequently peer reviewed again and published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Mathematics.

## Education and career

Born in Flatbush, New York, he studied at the United States Military Academy at West Point (Distinguished Graduate of the Class of 1966), and Stanford University (M.S. in Operations Research). After graduating from the U.S. Army Ranger School and serving as an Army Captain in the Combat Engineers of the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, he returned to study mathematics at the University of Göttingen (Fulbright Scholar), the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D. under advisor Lester Dubins), and as NATO/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University.
He spent most of his career as a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with temporary appointments at Washington University in St. Louis, Tel Aviv University, the University of Hawaii, the University of Göttingen (Fulbright Professor), the University of Costa Rica, the Free University of Amsterdam, the Mexican Centre for Mathematical Research (CIMAT), and as Gauss Professor in the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. Hill has given invited mathematics research lectures in English, German, Spanish and Dutch.

## Selected publications

* Theodore P. Hill (1995). "A Statistical Derivation of the Significant-Digit Law" (PDF). Statistical Science. 10 (4): 354–363. doi:10.1214/ss/1177009869. MR 1421567.
* Theodore P. Hill (July–August 1998). "The First Digit Phenomenon" (PDF). American Scientist. 86 (4): 358+. Bibcode:1998AmSci..86..358H. doi:10.1511/1998.4.358. S2CID 13553246.
* Theodore P. Hill (July–August 2000). "Mathematical Devices for Getting a Fair Share" (PDF). American Scientist. 88 (4): 325+. Bibcode:2000AmSci..88..325H. doi:10.1511/2000.4.325. S2CID 221539202.
* Theodore P. Hill (March–April 2009). "Knowing When to Stop". American Scientist. 97 (2): 126+. doi:10.1511/2009.77.126. S2CID 124798270.
* Arno Berger & Theodore P. Hill (2015). An Introduction to Benford's Law. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16306-2.
* Theodore P. Hill (2017). Pushing Limits: From West Point to Berkeley and Beyond. American Mathematical Society and Mathematical Association of America. ISBN 978-1-4704-3584-4.
* Theodore P. Hill (2018). "Slicing Sandwiches, States, and Solar Systems". American Scientist. 106 (1): 42–49. doi:10.1511/2018.106.1.42.
* Theodore P. Hill & Kent E. Morrison (2023). "The Math of Beach Pebble Formation". American Scientist. 111 (3): 168–175. doi:10.1511/2023.111.3.168.