 harold hotelling (; september 29, 1895 â december 26, 1973) was a mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist. he was associate professor of mathematics at stanford university from 1927 until 1931, a member of the faculty of columbia university from 1931 until 1946, and a professor of mathematical statistics at the university of north carolina at chapel hill from 1946 until his death. a street in chapel hill bears his name. in 1972 he received the north carolina award for contributions to science. ==statistics== hotelling is known to statisticians because of hotelling's t-squared distribution and its use in statistical hypothesis testing and confidence regions. he also introduced canonical correlation analysis. at the beginning of his statistical career hotelling came under the influence of r.a. fisher, whose statistical methods for research workers had "revolutionary importance", according to hotelling's review. hotelling was able to maintain professional relations with fisher, despite the latter's temper tantrums and polemics. hotelling suggested that fisher use the english word "cumulants" for the thiele's danish "semi-invariants". fisher's emphasis on the sampling distribution of a statistic was extended by jerzy neyman and egon pearson with greater precision and wider applications, which hotelling recognized. hotelling sponsored refugees from european anti-semitism and nazism, welcoming henry mann and abraham wald to his research group at columbia. while at hotelling's group, wald developed sequential analysis and statistical decision theory, which hotelling described as "pragmatism in action". i
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