Harold Hotelling and Deming

如果你只查 Wikipedia的 Harold Hotelling (1895-1973)條
你只知道他是數理經濟學的名家 --這方面主要論文少而精( 六--七篇)

我們查Deming博士晚年的兩本書的索引
可以知道都引用到Harold Hotelling 的"統計教育"之見解


事實上 他應該是位奇才 根據附的這篇 他進美國National Academy of Science 榮譽榜是經濟學和統計學共同推薦的

他在1929年就討論英國去從大師學習
Deming在1935年去倫敦一年

他們在1948年共同發表一篇報告

Hotelling, H., Bartky, W. Deming, W.E.,Friedman, M., Hoel, P.(1948). The Teaching of Statistics, A Report of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Committee on the Teaching of Statistics, Ann. Math. Stat. 19, 95-115

紅珠實驗的道具 據說是Harold Hotelling 在史丹佛大學教書時想出的教具
不過 真正讓它發揚光大的 當然是 Deming

Harold Hotelling’s review of the 1^st edition of R. A. Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers

John Aldrich, University of Southampton, UK. (home) Most recent changes April 2008.

Introduction

Ronald Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925) is considered by many to be the most influential statistics book of the twentieth century. Yet according to Fisher’s biographer, “The book did not receive a single good review.” Box (1978, p. 130).

It is debateable whether Box’s generalisation applied to all the British reviews but it certainly did not apply to the review by the American statistician, Harold Hotelling. He reviewed the book on his own initiative and on the basis of it became Fisher’s earliest fan. Some spectators found Hotelling’s enthusiasm excessive. Arne Fisher, the Danish-American actuary, disapproved of “adoring disciples.” See Arne Fisher letter to RAF: correspondence p.310.

Harold Hotelling (1895-1973) completed a PhD at Princeton on topology supervised by Oswald Veblen. He soon switched to statistics and he encountered Fisher’s work very early in his career. Hotelling had leave from Stanford to spend June-December 1929 as a “voluntary worker” with Fisher at Rothamsted. Hotelling was the most mathematically sophisticated of the early reviewers and he did not complain, as the other reviewers did, about the difficulty of the book. Yet he saw a need for a Statistical Methods with proofs and in the early years discussed with Fisher their collaborating on such a work. In the event there was no joint work, nor a theory book by either of them. Fisher did not really see the need for such a work: see his advice to the young George Barnard. Hotelling was the first to attempt a rigorous development of Fisher’s maximum likelihood theory: see Stigler (forthcoming).

Hotelling was also a distinguished economic theorist and so it is appropriate that the National Academy of Science memoir was a joint effort from Erich Lehmann and Kenneth.Arrow, a Hotelling student and Nobel laureate in Economics.