Walter Francis Willcox

Walter Francis Willcox, Ph.D., LL.D. (March 22, 1861 – October 12, 1964)[1] was an American statistician. He was born in Reading, Massachusetts to William Henry Willcox and Anne Holmes Goodenow. He was graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1880; Amherst College in 1884 with an A.B. and in 1888 received and A.M. degree from Amherst College. He received an LL.B degree (1887) and a Ph.D. (1891) from Columbia. In 1906 he received an honorary LL.D. degree from Amherst College.[2]

He was a Cornell University faculty member from 1891 to 1931 within the President White School of History and Political Science. He held the presidency of the American Statistical Association in 1911-12 and of the American Economic Association in 1915. As well as essays and magazine articles, he published The Divorce Problem, A Study in Statistics (1891; second edition, 1897), and Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables, twelfth census (1906).

Willcox initiated the first statistics course at Cornell in 1892, one of the earliest university courses in statistics in the United States, and one among 16 universities with such courses in the 1890s.[3] His research interest was in vital statistics. Emil Julius Gumbel described his body of work, collected in Studies in American Demography, as "the type of old-fashioned writings which will continue to be of value notwithstanding all progress achieved in mathematical statistics." [4]

Publications

References

  1. ^ Rice, Stuart A (1964). "Walter Francis Willcox March 28, 1861 - October 30, 1964". Revue de l'Institut International de Statistique / Review of the International Statistical Institute (International Statistical Institute (ISI)) 32 (3): 340–346. JSTOR 1401885. 
  2. ^ Leonard, William R.; Leonard, William R (1961). "Walter Francis Willcox: Statist". The American Statistician (American Statistical Association) 15 (1): 16–19. doi:10.2307/2682503. JSTOR 2682503. 
  3. ^ Leonard, W.R.. Op. Cit.: 16. 
  4. ^ Gumbel, E.J. (1941). "Review of Studies in American Demography". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (American Academy of Political and Social Science) 218 (1): 239. http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/218/1/239. Retrieved 2010-05-31.