Gottfried E. Noether
American statistician (1915–1991)
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Education and career
Noether was born into a Jewish family in Karlsruhe, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Empire in 1915. He later moved to Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). The Nazi regime annulled his citizenship. He studied mathematics from 1935 to 1937 in Tomsk University and tried after his father's arrest to go to USA. With the help of his relatives he reached Sweden in 1938 and from there he travelled to the United States in 1939. There he earned a bachelor's degree (1940) and a master's degree (1941).
The following four years, during World War II, he served with US Army intelligence in England, France, and Germany. Noether was one of the Ritchie Boys. After the war, he earned a doctorate from Columbia University (1949).
He worked in academia for the rest of his career, beginning at New York University. He moved to Boston University in 1952 where he worked until he joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut in 1968. There, he eventually became chairman of the department of statistics. He retired in 1985.
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Statistician
Noether served on a statistical advisory committee for the United States Office of Management and Budget and as an associate editor of The American Statistician. He was a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
As an expert on non-parametric statistics, he wrote over 50 articles and six books. He also wrote a brief biography of his father Fritz, who was executed in the Soviet Union in 1941.
Honors
In 1999, the Gottfried E. Noether Awards were established to "recognize distinguished researchers and teachers and to support research in the field of nonparametric statistics." The initial recipients of the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Awards were Erich Leo Lehmann (2000), Robert V. Hogg (2001), and Pranab K. Sen (2002).