Wolfowitz

Jacob Wolfowitz

Born: 19 March 1910 in Warsaw, Russian Poland
Died: 16 July 1981 in Tampa, Florida, USA

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Wolfowitz's father emigrated to the USA in 1914 and Jacob joined him in 1920. He obtained a doctorate from New York University in 1942 and that year joined the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, becoming professor of mathematics at Cornell in 1951. He joined Illinois in 1970 and retired in 1978 going to South Florida.

Wolfowitz worked on nonparametric statistical inference with Wald. It is in a paper by Wolfowitz in 1942 that the word 'nonparametric' appears for the first time. He also collaborated with Wald on sequential analysis.

Information theory, which had been started by Shannon, was another area to which Wolfowitz made important contributions. His book Coding Theorems of Information Theory (3rd ed. 1978) is a classic in the subject.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. R Ahlswede, Jacob Wolfowitz, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 28 (1982), 687-690. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996