Wilcoxon, Frank (1892–1965)

Frank Wilcoxon was born in Glengarriffe Castle near Cork in Ireland on September 2, 1892 (his wealthy American parents had rented the castle for the occasion). However, Wilcoxon became something of a rebel, running away to sea as a teenager and spending periods as an oil-well worker and as a tree surgeon. It was not until after World War I that Wilcoxon finally went to university. He studied chemistry at Rutgers University, where he was a contemporary of the singer Paul Robeson. He obtained his MSc in 1921 and his PhD in 1924 (in physical chemistry, at Cornell University).

In 1925, Ronald Fisher had published the first edition of his classic work Statistical Methods for Research Workers. This was compulsory reading for Wilcoxon during his postdoctoral fellowship at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Yonkers, where he investigated the use of copper compounds as fungicides. Wilcoxon gained further employment at the Institute before moving, in 1943, to become group leader of the insecticide and fungicide laboratory at American Cyanamid, where he contributed to the development of malathion.

Wilcoxon's first statistical papers appeared in 1945, and it was in the second of these that he introduced the rank-sum and signed-rank tests that nowadays bear his name. These tests, and their extensions, were collected in the 1947 pamphlet titled Some Rapid Approximate Statistical Procedures.

In 1960, following retirement from industry, Wilcoxon accepted a part-time appointment in the new department of statistics at Florida State University, in Tallahassee. Wilcoxon had been an enthusiastic cyclist in his younger days, and at Tallahassee his preferred method of transport was a motorcycle. He died there on November 18, 1965. His innovatory statistical work is now marked by the journal Technometrics, which gives an annual award in his name for the best practical applications paper.