Frank Wilcoxon
Born(1892-09-02)2 September 1892
County Cork, Ireland
Died18 November 1965(1965-11-18) (aged 73)
Tallahassee, Florida, USA
NationalityIrish American
Alma materCornell University
Rutgers University
Known forWilcoxon signed-rank test
Scientific career
FieldsChemistry
Statistics
InstitutionsBoyce Thompson Institute
Atlas Powder Company
American Cyanamid Company

Frank Wilcoxon (2 September 1892 – 18 November 1965) was a chemist and statistician, known for the development of several statistical tests.[1]

Education and career

Frank Wilcoxon was born to American parents on 2 September 1892 in County Cork, Ireland.[2] He grew up in Catskill, New York, but received part of his education in England. In 1917, he graduated from Pennsylvania Military College with a B.Sc. After the First World War he entered graduate studies, first at Rutgers University, where he was awarded an M.S. in chemistry in 1921, and then at Cornell University, gaining a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1924.

Wilcoxon entered a research career, working at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research from 1925 to 1941. He then moved to the Atlas Powder Company, where he designed and directed the Control Laboratory, before joining the American Cyanamid Company in 1943. During this time he developed an interest in inferential statistics through the study of Ronald Fisher's 1925 text, Statistical Methods for Research Workers. He retired in 1957.

Research

Over his career Wilcoxon published over 70 papers.[3] His most well-known paper[4] contained the two new statistical tests that still bear his name, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. These are non-parametric alternatives to the unpaired and paired Student's t-tests respectively. He died on November 18, 1965.

References

  1. ↑ Bradley, Ralph A.; Hollander, Myles (1997). "Wilcoxon, Frank". In Johnson, Norman L.; Kotz, Samuel (eds.). Leading Personalities in Statistical Sciences: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Wiley-Interscience. pp. 372–375. ISBN 0471163813.
  2. ↑ Bradley, R.A. (1966) Obituary: Frank Wilcoxon. Biometrics 22(1): 192–194
  3. ↑ Karas, J. & Savage, I.R. (1967) Publications of Frank Wilcoxon (1892–1965). Biometrics 23(1): 1–10
  4. ↑ Wilcoxon, F. (1945) Individual Comparisons by Ranking Methods. Biometrics Bulletin 1: 80–83.
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