IN MEMORIAM

IN MEMORIAM

Paul G. Hoel

Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus

Los Angeles

1905—2000

Paul G. Hoel, an eminent statistician and educator, died on April 6, 2000. He spent much of his career at UCLA, retiring in 1971, and was likely best known for his text, Introduction to Mathematical Statistics, that was first published in 1947.

 

Born in 1905 in Iola, Wisconsin, Hoel graduated from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa in 1926. He went on to obtain his Ph.D. in 1933 from the University of Minnesota under the direction of Dunham Jackson for work in approximation theory. After stints at Rose Polytechnic Institute and Oregon State University, he joined the Mathematics Department at UCLA in 1939. How and when his attention turned to statistics is not clear, but he had an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship in 1936-37 and spent this time studying under Ragnar Frisch in Oslo.

 

His early years on campus coincided with the time when statistics was being recognized around the country as a full-fledged university discipline. Hoel was UCLA's point of contact with this activity. He knew and communicated with the now-famous movers of his time, and counted many of them among his friends. While UCLA did not then begin a separate department, Hoel ensured a statistical awareness that was campus-wide and, at the same time, he served the Mathematics Department ably in its administration, including a brief tenure as chair during the 1950s.

 

He took a short leave during World War II to work on statistical problems for the Operations Analysis Section of Headquarters, Second Air Force. On returning to the Mathematics Department after that service, he turned his attention in 1945 to the writing of the first of his seven books. This text was among very few options available at the time, it went through five editions, was translated into many languages, and looks remarkably modern to this day.

 

He was a fine teacher in the classroom, and he had 16 Ph.D. students finish during the period 1950-1967. This last was an especially notable record in those days, and an Angus Taylor memo of 1960, for example, remarks that Hoel had had twelve Ph.D.'s finish under his direction, while no other mathematics faculty member had had more than seven.

 

Hoel's research was varied in nature, and substantial. Perhaps he is best remembered for his seminal work on design theory in the fifties and early sixties, work that harkened back to his approximation theory background, but he had interest in applied areas as well. He maintained an active interest in research to the extent that, eight years after his retirement, he published an application of his polynomial design results to logistic regression. This work was used by the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in the design of dose response experiments for setting standards of acceptable levels of carcinogens in the environment. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1953-54.

 

A plainspoken man unafraid of stating his opinion, he was steadfastly loyal and generous to his friends and colleagues. He was physically vigorous, an avid gardener and a connoisseur of wines. Above all he was a devoted family man.

 

In his retirement years he maintained a presence on campus into the 1990s. His 90th birthday was commemorated in a special session at the Joint Statistics Meeting in Toronto. His model for service to a university, lasting some 50 years, left a mark on many people.

 

He is survived by Hazel, his wife of 67 years, two sons, a daughter, ten grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

 

Thomas Ferguson

Robert Jennrich

Donald Ylvisaker