Gottfried E. Noether
Gottfried Emanuel Noether (January 7, 1915 – August 22, 1991) was a German-born American statistician and educator. He came from a famous math family: his father Fritz Noether, his aunt Emmy Noether, his grandfather Max Noether, and his brother Herman Noether.
He was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, and later lived in Breslau. When the Nazi regime took power, his German citizenship was annulled. He studied mathematics at Tomsk University from 1935 to 1937 and, after his father’s arrest, made his way to the United States via Sweden in 1939.
Noether earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University in 1940 and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1941. During World War II, he served in U.S. Army intelligence in England, France, and Germany as one of the Ritchie Boys. After the war, he earned a PhD from Columbia University in 1949.
He spent his career in academia. He started at New York University, moved to Boston University in 1952, and joined the University of Connecticut in 1968, eventually becoming chair of the statistics department. He retired in 1985. He also served on a statistical advisory committee for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and was an associate editor of The American Statistician. He was a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was an expert in nonparametric statistics, wrote more than 50 articles and six books, and even wrote a short biography of his father Fritz Noether.
In 1999, the Gottfried E. Noether Awards were created to recognize distinguished researchers and teachers and to support research in nonparametric statistics. The first recipients of the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Awards were Erich Leo Lehmann (2000), Robert V. Hogg (2001), and Pranab K. Sen (2002).
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:54 (CET).