Wassily Hoeffding

Wassily Hoeffding
Born(1914-06-12)June 12, 1914
DiedFebruary 28, 1991(1991-02-28) (aged 76)
Alma materBerlin University
Known forHoeffding's inequality, Hoeffding's lemma
Scientific career
FieldsStatistician
InstitutionsUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Doctoral advisorAlfred Klose
Doctoral students

Wassily Hoeffding (June 12, 1914 – February 28, 1991) was a Finnish-born 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.