15 Facts About Harold Hotelling

Harold Hotelling was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist, known for Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics, as well as Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics.

Harold Hotelling developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science.

Harold Hotelling was associate professor of mathematics at Stanford University from 1927 until 1931, a member of the faculty of Columbia University from 1931 until 1946, and a professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1946 until his death.

Harold Hotelling was able to maintain professional relations with Fisher, despite the latter's temper tantrums and polemics.

Harold Hotelling suggested that Fisher use the English word "cumulants" for Thiele's Danish "semi-invariants".

Harold Hotelling sponsored refugees from European anti-semitism and Nazism, welcoming Henry Mann and Abraham Wald to his research group at Columbia.

Harold Hotelling was known for his leadership of departments at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina.

Harold Hotelling has a crucial place in the growth of mathematical economics; several areas of active research were influenced by his economics papers.

Later, at Columbia University in the '40s, Harold Hotelling in turn encouraged young Kenneth Arrow to switch from mathematics and statistics applied to actuarial studies towards more general applications of mathematics in general economic theory.

Harold Hotelling was influenced by the writing of Henry George and was an editorial adviser for the Georgist journal AJES Mason Gaffney claims that Harold Hotelling kept his lifelong beliefs about land and tax reform secret because he feared ridicule.

Harold Hotelling describes how, for example, some factories might make shoes for the poor and others for the rich, but they end up alike.

Harold Hotelling pointed out that when local public goods like roads and trains become congested, users create an additional marginal cost of excluding others.

Harold Hotelling became an early advocate of Georgist congestion pricing and stated that the purpose of this unique type of toll fee was in no way to recoup investment costs, but was instead a way of changing behavior and compensating those who are excluded.

Harold Hotelling describes how human attention is in limited supply at any given time and place, which produces a rental value; he concludes that billboards could be regulated or taxed on similar grounds as other scarcity rents.

Harold Hotelling reasoned that rent and taxation were analogous, the public and private versions of a similar thing.