Frank Wilcoxon

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Frank Wilcoxon (born September 2, 1892 in County Cork , Ireland , † November 18, 1965 in Tallahassee , Florida ) was an American chemist who was particularly concerned with the development of methods for statistical analysis of scientific data. He became famous for two new statistical tests named after him.

Life

Frank Wilcoxon was born in Ireland to American parents in 1892 and grew up in the small town of Catskill in Greene County , New York State . He graduated from the Pennsylvania Military College , which he completed in 1917 with a B.Sc. degree . Four years later, he earned an MSc in chemistry from Rutgers University , and in 1924 a PhD in physical chemistry from Cornell University .

From 1925 to 1941 he did research at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research . He then moved to the Atlas Powder Company for a short time , before he started working for American Cyanamid in 1943 and dealt with the statistical analysis of scientific data. The most important of his around 70 publications appeared in 1945 under the title “Individual Comparisons by Ranking Methods” in the journal Biometrics Bulletin . In it, he described two new statistical tests, known as the Wilcoxon rank sum test and Wilcoxon signed rank test , which to this day are among the most widely used nonparametric tests for comparing two samples .

In 1957, at the age of 65, he retired from the company and served part-time as a consultant for the Boyce Thompson Institute and as a lecturer in the statistics department at Florida State University . He died eight years later in Tallahassee of complications from a heart attack .

literature

  • Frank Wilcoxon. In: Christopher Charles Heyde, Eugene Seneta: Statisticians of the Centuries. Springer, New York 2001, ISBN 0-38-795283-7 , pp. 420-423
  • Wilcoxon, Frank (a biography). In: William Kruskal , Judith M. Tanur: International Encyclopedia of Statistics. Volume 2. Collier Macmillan, London 1978, ISBN 0-02-917970-X , pp. 1245-1250

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ J. Karas, Savage, IR: Publications of Frank Wilcoxon (1892-1965) . In: Biometrics . 23, No. 1, 1967, pp. 1-10.
  2. ^ Frank Wilcoxon: Individual Comparisons by Ranking Methods . In: Biometrics Bulletin . 1, 1945, pp. 80-83.
personal data
SURNAME Wilcoxon, Frank
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist and statistician
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH County Cork , Ireland
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1965
Place of death Tallahassee , Florida