Harold Hotelling (
Fulda, MinnesotaFulda is a city in Murray County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 1,283 at the 2000 census.-Geography:According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1.0 square miles , of which, 1.0 square miles of it is land and 0.1 square miles of it is...
, september 29, 1895 – december 26, 1973) was a mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist. His name is known to all statisticians because of
Hotelling's T-square distributionIn statistics, Hotelling's T-square statistic, named for Harold Hotelling,is a generalization of Student's t statistic that is used in multivariate hypothesis testing.Hotelling's T-square statistic is defined as...
and its use in statistical hypothesis testing and confidence regions. He also introduced canonical correlation analysis, and is the eponym of
Hotelling's lawHotelling's law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible. This is also referred to as the principle of minimum differentiation as well as Hotelling's "linear city model"...
,
Hotelling's lemmaHotelling's lemma is a result in microeconomics that relates the supply of a good to the profit of the good's producer. It was first shown by Harold Hotelling, and is widely used in the theory of the firm. The lemma is very simple, and can be stated:...
, and
Hotelling's ruleHotelling's rule is defining the net price path as a function of time while maximising rent in the time of fully extracting a non-renewable natural resource...
in
economicsEconomics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
.
He was Associate Professor of Mathematics at
Stanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States...
from 1927, a member of the faculty of
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
from 1931 until 1946, and a Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel HillThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. The university is the oldest in, and flagship of, the University of North Carolina system...
from 1946 until his death.
Harold Hotelling (
Fulda, MinnesotaFulda is a city in Murray County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 1,283 at the 2000 census.-Geography:According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1.0 square miles , of which, 1.0 square miles of it is land and 0.1 square miles of it is...
, september 29, 1895 – december 26, 1973) was a mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist. His name is known to all statisticians because of
Hotelling's T-square distributionIn statistics, Hotelling's T-square statistic, named for Harold Hotelling,is a generalization of Student's t statistic that is used in multivariate hypothesis testing.Hotelling's T-square statistic is defined as...
and its use in statistical hypothesis testing and confidence regions. He also introduced canonical correlation analysis, and is the eponym of
Hotelling's lawHotelling's law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible. This is also referred to as the principle of minimum differentiation as well as Hotelling's "linear city model"...
,
Hotelling's lemmaHotelling's lemma is a result in microeconomics that relates the supply of a good to the profit of the good's producer. It was first shown by Harold Hotelling, and is widely used in the theory of the firm. The lemma is very simple, and can be stated:...
, and
Hotelling's ruleHotelling's rule is defining the net price path as a function of time while maximising rent in the time of fully extracting a non-renewable natural resource...
in
economicsEconomics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
.
He was Associate Professor of Mathematics at
Stanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States...
from 1927, a member of the faculty of
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
from 1931 until 1946, and a Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel HillThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. The university is the oldest in, and flagship of, the University of North Carolina system...
from 1946 until his death. A street in
Chapel HillChapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , the oldest state-supported university in the U.S...
bears his name. In 1972 he received the
North Carolina AwardThe North Carolina Award is the highest civilian award bestowed by the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is awarded in the four fields of science, literature, the fine arts, and public service....
for contributions to science.
The historian
Stephen StiglerStephen Mack Stigler is Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of Statistics of the University of Chicago.. His research has focused on statistical theory of robust estimators and the history of statistics....
has said that it was because of Hotelling's suggestion in a letter to
R.A. FisherSir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. He was described by Anders Hald as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science," and Richard Dawkins described him as "the greatest of...
that
cumulantIn probability theory and statistics, the cumulants κn of a random variable X are defined by the cumulant-generating function, the logarithm of the moment-generating function, if it exists:...
s are known by their now-standard name.
His economics papers have inspired research agenda in several areas still active. Hotelling has a crucial place in the pedigree of modern economic theory. While at the University of Washington, he was encouraged to switch from pure mathematics toward mathematical economics by the famous mathematician
Eric Temple BellEric Temple Bell was a mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the U.S. for most of his life...
. Later, at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
in the '40s, Hotelling in turn encouraged young
Kenneth ArrowKenneth Joseph Arrow is an American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. To date, he is the youngest person to receive this award, at 51....
to switch from mathematics and statistics applied to actuarial studies towards more general applications of mathematics in general economic theory.
Works
- "A General Mathematical Theory of Depreciation", 1925, Journal of ASA.
- "Differential Equations Subject to Error", 1927, Journal of ASA
- "Applications of the Theory of Error to the Interpretation of Trends", with H. Working, 1929, Journal of ASA.
- "Stability in Competition", 1929, EJ.
- "The Economics of Exhaustible Resources", 1931, JPE.
- "The Generalization of Student's Ratio", 1931, Annals of Mathematical Statistics.
- "Edgeworth's Taxation Paradox and the Nature of Supply and Demand Functions", 1932, JPE.
- "Analysis of a Complex of Statistical Variables with Principal Components",1933, Journal of Educational Psychology
- "Demand Functions with Limited Budgets", 1935, Econometrica
Econometrica is an academic journal of economics, publishing articles not only in econometrics but in many areas of economics. It is published by the Econometric Society and distributed by Wiley-Blackwell...
.
- "The most predictable criterion", 1935, Journal of Educational Psychology
- "Relation Between Two Sets of Variates", 1936, Biometrika.
- "Rank Correlation and Tests of Significance Involving no Assumption of Normality", in "American Mathematical Statistics", 1936 (coauthor M. R. Pabst)
- "The General Welfare in Relation to Problems of Taxation and of Railway and Utility Rates", 1938, Econometrica
Econometrica is an academic journal of economics, publishing articles not only in econometrics but in many areas of economics. It is published by the Econometric Society and distributed by Wiley-Blackwell...
.
- "A generalized T-Test and measure of multivariate dispersion", Proc. Second Berkeley Symposium of Mathematical Statistics and Probability, 1951
External links
These entries have photographs. There is another at
For Hotelling's PhD students see