Wassily Hoeffding
| Wassily Hoeffding | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 12, 1914 Mustamäki, Grand Duchy of Finland |
| Died | February 28, 1991 (aged 76) Chapel Hill, North Carolina |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Statistician |
| Institutions | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Alma mater | Berlin University |
| Doctoral advisor | Alfred Klose |
| Doctoral students | Donald Burkholder |
| Known for | Hoeffding's inequality |
Wassily Hoeffding (June 12, 1914 – February 28, 1991) was a Finnish statistician and probabilist. Hoeffding was one of the founders of nonparametric statistics, in which Hoeffding contributed the idea and basic results on U-statistics.
In probability theory, Hoeffding's inequality provides an upper bound on the probability for the sum of random variables to deviate from its expected value.
Hoeffding was born in Mustamäki, present-day Finland, (Gorkovskoye, Russia until 1940), although his place of birth is registered as St. Petersburg on his birth certificate. His father was an economist and a disciple of Peter Struve, the Russian social scientist and public figure. His paternal grandparents were Danish and his father's uncle was the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding. His mother, née Wedensky, had studied medicine. Both grandfathers had been engineers. In 1918 the family left Tsarskoye Selo for the Ukraine and, after traveling through scenes of civil war, finally left Russia for Denmark in 1920, where Wassily entered school.
In 1924 the family settled in Berlin. He migrated with his mother to the United States in 1946. His younger brother, Oleg, became a military historian in the United States.
In 1948, he introduced the concept of U-statistics.
See the collected works of Wassily Hoeffding.
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