Robert Vincent Hogg (8 November 1924 – 23 December 2014)Colleagues, family remember a statistical giant was an American statistician and professor of statistics of the University of Iowa. Hogg is known for his widely used textbooks on statistics (with his 1963 Ph.D. student Elliot Alan Tanis) and on mathematical statistics (with his 1950 Ph.D. advisor Allen Thornton Craig). Hogg has received recognition for his research on robust and adaptive nonparametric statistics and for his scholarship on total quality management and statistics education.

Academic career Early life Hogg was born on 8 November 1924 in Hannibal, Missouri and graduated from West Rockford High School in 1942. He served three years in the U.S. Navy from 1943 through 1946. He was in the V-12 Navy College Training Program at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University of New Mexico.Pages 137–138 in Randles."Men and Women in The Armed Forces", Rockford Register-Republic, Rockford, Illinois, volume 90, number 24, March 14, 1944, page 5. In 1947, he graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. With the goal of becoming an actuary, Hogg matriculated at the mathematics department of the University of Iowa (then the "State University of Iowa").Pages 137–139 in Randles. However, Hogg studied statistics under Allen Craig, who became his mentor and helped him obtain a job teaching statistics at the Mathematics Department. Hogg earned his Ph.D. 1950 under Allen Craig. After graduating, Hogg remained at the Mathematics Department, where he remained to become a long-serving professor.

Basu's theorem: Special cases Hogg independently discovered a special case of "Basu's theorem", a few years before the publication by Deb Basu.Basu's theorem appears in For Hogg's independent and early (1953) discovery of special cases of Basu's theorem, see page 511 in Hogg's second paper on the topic of Basu's theorem was never published, because of a negative report by an anonymous referee in 1953.Randles and Calvin, page 2476. (Later, in his interview with Randles, Hogg speculates that the anonymous referee was Erich Leo Lehmann.) Later, Basu refers "to Hogg and Craig (1956) for several interesting uses [of Basu's theorem] in proving results in distribution theory".Page 348 in Statistical Information and Likelihood : A Collection of Critical Essays by Dr. D. Basu; J. K. Ghosh, editor. Springer 1988.

Collaboration and friendship with Allen Craig The textbook "Hogg and Craig" was innovative, particularly in emphasizing sufficient statistics: Sufficient statistics were treated not only for parametric families but also for nonparametric probability distributions: In particular, the sufficiency and completeness of the order statistics from a continuous distribution were treated. Another innovation was the systematic derivation of the distributions of functions of several random variables by using the change-of-variable method.Page 2468 in Randles and Calvin. (Pages 139–140 in Randles.)

As noted before, Craig was Hogg's mentor, helping him to obtain a teaching position while a graduate student and also supervising his thesis. Later, after Hogg had graduated, Craig became a close friend, and served as the best man at Hogg's wedding and later as the "godparent" to each of Hogg's four children. Indeed, Hogg's son Allen was named after Craig.Page 141 in Randles, which mentions only two children. Page 149 mentions four children.

Chairing a new Department of Statistics In 1965 Hogg became the founding chair of the new Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, and he remained as the chair for nineteen years. At Iowa, Hogg held other positions, including Chair of the Quality Management and Productivity Program and the Hanson Chair of Manufacturing Productivity. After serving 51 years as an instructor at the University of Iowa, Hogg became Professor Emeritus in 2001.

Statistics education Hogg has been a leader in statistics education in the United States.Randles and Calvin, page 2468. Randles declares that Hogg is a leader in statistics education on page 144 of Randles.

Hogg has received a number of educational awards by state and national organizations: these awards include the Iowa Governor’s Science Medal for Teaching in 1990, the Iowa Board of Regents' Award for Faculty Excellence in 1992, and the Iowa Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA)'s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992 with the national MAA's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1993.Randles and Calvin report that the MAA award was in 1992 (Page 2468). (Randles reports the MAA prize in 1993 on page 146.) At the University of Iowa, Hogg won his first teaching award after a student submitted a nomination with the title "There is a hog in my statistics book!".Hogg quoted on page 146 in Randles.

Honors Hogg has been recognized internationally as a leading researcher in statistics and as an exemplary professor of statistics who has served as a public spokesperson for the profession. Hogg has had a particularly visible role in the United States, where he was elected as President of the American Statistical Association (ASA), serving in 1988. One of the ASA President's tasks is to arrange an annual meeting, and Hogg's diligence was rewarded by the ASA staff, who presented him with the name tag, "Boss Hogg" (after the name of a character in the television series The Dukes of Hazzard).Page 147 in Randles. Hogg was awarded the American Statistical Association Founders Award in 1991.Page 146 in Randles.

In 1993 Hogg received the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.

Hogg's 70th birthday was marked by a conference organized by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, whose proceedings were published as a special issue of Communications in Statistics – Theory and Methods in 1996; in the conference proceedings, a list of Hogg's publications appears on pages 2467–2481.

For his research in nonparametric statistics, Hogg received the Gottfried Noether Senior Scholar Award in 2001.

Hogg has also been internationally active on behalf of the statistics profession. Hogg is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, which awarded him its Carver Medal.Page 151 in Randles. Hogg is also an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

References

Textbooks ("Hogg and Craig" was first published in 1959.) | mr = 426223 Hogg, Robert V., Klugman, Stuart A. Loss distributions. With the assistance of Charles C. Hewitt and Gary Patrik. Wiley Series in Probability and Mathematical Statistics: Applied Probability and Statistics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1984. x+235 pp. . Hogg, Robert V. and Ledolter, J. (1992). Applied Statistics for Engineers and Physical Scientists. Macmillan, New York.

Articles

Statistics education and the statistics profession Robert V. Hogg (1978). An introduction to mathematical statistics. In Studies in Statistics (Robert V. Hogg, ed.) 1–7. Mathematical Association of America (Washington) Robert V. Hogg (Ed) (1980). Modern statistics: Methods and applications. American Mathematical Society (Providence, Rhode Island) Robert V. Hogg (1982). On graduate programs in statistics. In Teach. Statist. and Statist. Consult. (J.S. Rustagi and D.A. Wolfe, ed.) 71–80. Academic (New York) Robert V. Hogg and Jim Swift (1982). Statistical education at the school level in the United States and Canada. In Teaching Statistics in Schools Throughout the World (Vic Barnett, ed.) 139–171. International Statistical Institute (Voorburg, Netherlands)

Robert V. Hogg (1989). On statistical education in the United States since 1920. In ASA Sesquicentennial Invited Paper Sessions (Mitchell Gail and Norman L. Johnson, eds.) 286–292. American Statistical Association (Alexandria, Virginia) | jstor = 2289836

External links Hogg's homepage at the University of Iowa "On the History of Statistics and Actuarial Science at The University of Iowa" presented by Robert V. Hogg on October 2, 2003

Hogg at Mathematical Reviews