Wassily Hoeffding (June 12, 1914 – February 28, 1991) was an American statistician and probabilist. Hoeffding was one of the founders of nonparametric statistics, in which Hoeffding contributed the idea and basic results on U-statistics. In probability theory, Hoeffding's inequality provides an upper bound on the probability for the sum of random variables to deviate from its expected value.

Personal life

Hoeffding was born in Mustamäki, Finland, (Gorkovskoye, Russia since 1940), although his place of birth is registered as St. Petersburg on his birth certificate. His father was an economist and a disciple of Peter Struve, the Russian social scientist and public figure. His paternal grandparents were Danish and his father's uncle was the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding. His mother, née Wedensky, had studied medicine. Both grandfathers had been engineers. In 1918 the family left Tsarskoye Selo for Ukraine and, after traveling through scenes of civil war, finally left Russia for Denmark in 1920, where Wassily entered school. In 1924 the family settled in Berlin. Hoeffding obtained his PhD in 1940 at the University of Berlin. He migrated with his mother to the United States in 1946. His younger brother, Oleg, became a military historian in the United States. Hoeffding's ashes were buried in a small cemetery on land owned by George E. Nicholson, Jr.'s family in Chatham County, NC about 11 miles south of Chapel Hill, NC.

Work

In 1948, he introduced the concept of U-statistics. See the collected works of Wassily Hoeffding.

Writings