George Udny Yule (February 18, 1871 – June 26, 1951) was a Scottish statistician. Yule made important contributions to the theory and practice of correlation, regression, and association, as well as to time series analysis. The Yule distribution, a discrete power law, is named after him. February 18 is the 49th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1871 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... June 26 is the 177th day of the year (178th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 188 days remaining. ... 1951 (MCMLI) was a common year starting on Monday; see its calendar. ... ... For Wikipedia statistics, see m:Statistics Statistics is the science and practice of developing human knowledge through the use of empirical data expressed in quantitative form. ... In probability theory and statistics, correlation, also called correlation coefficient, is a numeric measure of the strength of linear relationship between two random variables. ... Regression analysis is any statistical method where the mean of one or more random variables is predicted conditioned on other (measured) random variables. ... In statistics and signal processing, a time series is a sequence of data points, measured typically at successive times, spaced apart at uniform time intervals. ... Originally the term Zipfs law meant the observation of Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf (SAMPA: [zIf]) that the frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n. ... See Also: Watt In physics, a power law relationship between two scalar quantities x and y is any such that the relationship can be written as where a (the constant of proportionality) and k (the exponent of the power law) are constants. ...

Biography

George Udny Yule, or Udny Yule, as he was usually called, was born in Scotland on February 18, 1871 into a family of administrators and scholars. His uncle was the noted orientalist, Sir Henry Yule. Udny Yule was educated at Winchester College and at University College London where he read engineering. After a year in Bonn doing research in experimental physics under Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, Yule returned to University College in 1893 to work as a demonstrator for Karl Pearson, one of his former teachers. Pearson was beginning to work in statistics and Yule followed him into this new field. Yule progressed to an assistant professorship but he left in 1899 to a better-paid position as secretary to an examination board. He continued to publish articles and also a very influential textbook, Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (1911); his book was based on the lectures he gave as the Newmarch lecturer at University College. In 1912 Yule moved to Cambridge University to a new created Lectureship in Statistics and he remained in Cambridge for the rest of his life. During the First World War Yule worked for the army and then for the Ministry of Food. A heart attack in 1931 left him a semi-invalid and led to his early retirement. His flow of publications almost ceased but, in the 1940s he found new interests, one of which led to a book, The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary. Udny Yule died in Cambridge on June 26, 1951. February 18 is the 49th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1871 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... Orientalism is the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures, by Westerners. ... Sir Henry Yule (May 1, 1820 - December 30, 1880), was a British Orientalist. ... Winchester College is a public school in the city of Winchester in Hampshire, in the south of England. ... University College London, commonly known as UCL, is one of the colleges that make up the University of London. ... Bonn is a city in Germany (19th largest), in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, located about 20 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the north of the Siebengebirge. ... Heinrich Hertz Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (February 22, 1857 - January 1, 1894), was the German physicist for whom the hertz, the SI unit of frequency, is named. ... Karl Pearson (pencil sketch in notebook; there is some see-through of writing on next page) Karl Pearson (March 27, 1857 – April 27, 1936) was a major contributor to the early development of statistics as a serious scientific discipline in its own right. ... William Newmarch (January 28, 1820 - March 23, 1882) English banker, economist and statistician. ... REDIRECT [1] ... 1931 (MCMXXXI) is a common year starting on Thursday. ... June 26 is the 177th day of the year (178th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 188 days remaining. ... 1951 (MCMLI) was a common year starting on Monday; see its calendar. ...

Yule’s first paper on statistics appeared in 1895, "On the Correlation of Total Pauperism with Proportion of Out-relief". Yule was interested in applying statistical techniques to social problems and he quickly became a member of the (Royal) Statistical Society. For many years the only members interested in mathematical statistics were Yule, Edgeworth and Bowley. In 1897–99 Yule wrote important papers on the theory of correlation and regression (linear regression), and after 1900 he worked on a parallel theory of association. His approach to association was quite different from Pearson’s and relations between them deteriorated. Yule had broad interests and his collaborators included the agricultural meteorologist R. H. Hooker, the medical statistician Major Greenwood and the agricultural scientist Sir Frank Engledow. Yule’s sympathy towards the newly rediscovered Mendelian theory of genetics led to several papers. In the 1920s he wrote three influential papers on time series analysis, "On the time-correlation problem" (1921), a critique of the variate difference method, "Why Do We Sometimes Get Nonsense Correlations between Time-series?" (1926), an investigation of a form of spurious correlation, and "On a Method of Investigating Periodicities in Disturbed Series, with Special Reference to Wolfer's Sunspot Numbers" (1927), which used an autoregressive model to model the sunspot time series instead of the established periodogram method of Schuster. Although Yule taught at Cambridge for twenty years, he seems to have had little impact on the development of statistics there. M. S. Bartlett recalled him as a "mentor" but his famous association with Maurice Kendall, who revised the Introduction to the Theory of Statistics, only came about after Kendall had graduated. In statistics, linear regression is a method of estimating the conditional expected value of one variable y given the values of some other variable or variables x. ... Meteorology is the scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes and forecasting. ... Reginald Hawthorn Hooker (January 12, 1867 - June 2, 1944) English civil servant, statistician and meteorologist. ... Major Greenwood (August 9, 1880 - October 5, 1949) English epidemiologist and statistician. ... Genetics (from the Greek genno γεννώ= give birth) is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms. ... A sunspot is a region on the Suns surface (photosphere) that is marked by a lower temperature than its surroundings, and intense magnetic activity. ... Arthur Schuster (September 12 1851 - October 17 1934 a versatile physicist known for his work in spectroscopy, electrochemistry, optics, X-radiography and the application of harmonic analysis to physics. ... Maurice Stevenson Bartlett (June 18, 1910 - January 8, 2002) was an English statistician who made particular contributions to the analysis of data with spatial and temporal patterns. ... Maurice George Kendall (Kettering, Northamptonshire, England, September 6, 1907 - Redhill, Surrey, England, March 29, 1983) was a leading mathematician. ...

Selected works

• G. Udny Yule, "On the Significance of Bravais' Formulæ for Regression, &c, in the case of Skew Correlation", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 60 (1896–1897), pp. 477–489.
• G. Udny Yule, "On the Association of Attributes in Statistics", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Ser. A, Vol. 194 (1900), pp. 257–319.
• G. Udny Yule, "On the Theory of Correlation for any Number of Variables, Treated by a New System of Notation", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 79 (1907), pp. 182–193.
• G. Udny Yule Introduction to the Theory of Statistics London Griffin 1911.
• G. Udny Yule, "A Mathematical Theory of Evolution, based on the Conclusions of Dr. J. C. Willis, F.R.S.", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Ser. B, Vol. 213 (1925), pp. 21–87.
• G. Udny Yule, "On a Method of Investigating Periodicities in Disturbed Series, with Special Reference to Wolfer's Sunspot Numbers", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Ser. A, Vol. 226 (1927), pp. 267–298.

External links

• MacTutor: George Udny Yule
• George Udny Yule: Statistical Scientist