George W. Snedecor

Who was George W. Snedecor?

George Waddel Snedecor was an American mathematician and statistician. He contributed to the foundations of analysis of variance, data analysis, experimental design, and statistical methodology. Snedecor's F distribution and the George W. Snedecor Award of the American Statistical Association are named after him.

Snedecor founded the first academic department of statistics in the United States, at Iowa State University. He also created the first statistics laboratory in the U.S. at Iowa State, and was a pioneer of modern applied statistics in the U.S. His 1938 textbook Statistical Methods became an essential resource: "In the 1970s, a review of citations in published scientific articles from all areas of science showed that Snedecor's Statistical Methods was the most frequently cited book."

Snedecor was awarded honorary doctorates in science by North Carolina State University in 1956 and by Iowa State University in 1958.

Snedecor Hall, at Iowa State University, is the home of the Statistics Department. It was constructed in 1939. At Iowa State, he was an early user of John Vincent Atanasoff's Atanasoff-Berry Computer.