Nationality American Name Wassily Hoeffding Academic advisor Alfred Klose Known for Hoeffding's inequality | Doctoral advisor Alfred Klose Fields Statistician Alma mater Berlin University Role Statistician | |
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Born June 12, 1914
Mustamaki, Grand Duchy of Finland ( 1914-06-12 ) Institutions University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Died February 28, 1991, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States Education Humboldt University of Berlin | ||
Doctoral students Donald Burkholder | ||
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.
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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.
Personal life
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.
Work
In 1948, he introduced the concept of U-statistics.
See the collected works of Wassily Hoeffding.