Jacob Wolfowitz

Jacob Wolfowitz
Wolfowitz in 1970 (photo courtesy of MFO)
Born	March 19, 1910(1910-03-19) Warsaw, Poland
Died	July 16, 1981(1981-07-16) (aged 71) Tampa, Florida, United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Statistics
Institutions	University of South Florida Cornell University Columbia University
Alma mater	New York University
Doctoral advisor	Donald Flanders
Doctoral students	Albert Bowker Jack Kiefer Howard Levene Gottfried E. Noether
Known for	Wald–Wolfowitz runs test

Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910 – July 16, 1981) was a Polish-born American statistician and Shannon Award-winning information theorist. He was the father of former Deputy Secretary of Defense and World Bank Group President Paul Wolfowitz.

Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1910, he emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1920. In the mid-1930s, Wolfowitz began his career as high school mathematics teacher and continued teaching until 1942 when he received his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from New York University. While a part-time graduate student, Wolfowitz met Abraham Wald, with whom he collaborated in numerous joint papers in the field of mathematical statistics. This collaboration continued until Wald's death in an airplane crash in 1950. In 1951, Wolfowitz became a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, where he stayed until 1970. He died of a heart attack in Tampa, Florida, where he was a professor at the University of South Florida.

Wolfowitz's main contributions were in the fields of statistical decision theory, non-parametric statistics, sequential analysis, and information theory.

References

• Kiefer, J., ed. Jacob Wolfowitz Selected Papers. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1980. ISBN 0-387-90463-8.
• Wolfowitz, Jacob, Coding Theorems of Information Theory. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1978. ISBN 0-387-08548-3.

External links

• Jacob Wolfowitz at the Mathematics Genealogy Project..
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Jacob Wolfowitz", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Wolfowitz.html .
• Zacks, Shelemyahu. "Biographical Memories: Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910–July 16, 1981)". National Academy of Sciences, n.d. Accessed May 3, 2007.