Gábor J. Székely

Gábor J. Székely (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈseːkɛj]; born February 4, 1947, in Budapest) is a Hungarian-American statistician/mathematician best known for introducing energy statistics (E-statistics). Examples include: the distance correlation, which is a bona fide dependence measure, equals zero exactly when the variables are independent; the distance skewness, which equals zero exactly when the probability distribution is diagonally symmetric; the E-statistic for normality test; and the E-statistic for clustering.

Other important discoveries include the Hungarian semigroups, the location testing for Gaussian scale mixture distributions, the uncertainty principle of game theory, the half-coin which involves negative probability, and the solution of an old open problem of lottery mathematics: in a 5-from-90 lotto the minimum number of tickets one needs to buy to guarantee that at least one of these tickets has (at least) 2 matches is exactly 100.