George Udny Yule was born near Haddington, Scotland on February 18, 1871, and at the age of 4, moved with his family to London. During the next decade, he attended boarding schools and at age 16 entered University College, London in pursuit of an engineering degree. Though competent in engineering, his passion for research did not seem to ignite, until he met the statistician, Karl Pearson. Between 1895 and 1897, Yule, inspired by some of Pearson’s ideas, produced several important papers on correlation and regression.
By 1911, George had developed a significant number of new statistical techniques that he published in a book titled, An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics, that would become the work for which he is most remembered. Described by statistician Jerzy Neyman as “the best book on statistics that was ever written,” this classic prevailed through a series of 14 editions.
In 1897, recognizing that in the social sciences extraction of causal factors may be more complex than in physics where fewer variables are involved, Yule observed:
The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics.
