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Wassily Hoeffding, 76, Authority on Statistics

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March 3, 1991, Section 1, Page 42Buy Reprints
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Wassily Hoeffding, an educator and internationally known statistician, died Thursday at Haven Hill Nursing Home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 76 years old and lived in Chapel Hill.

He died of pneumonia, said his brother, Oleg Hoeffding of Arlington, Vt.

A 1940 Ph.D. graduate of the University of Berlin, Dr. Hoeffding was professor emeritus of statistics at the University of North Carolina, where he taught for 32 years.

Born in Finland, Dr. Hoeffding worked as a research assistant at an inter-university actuarial institute in World War II. He emigrated to the United States in 1946, joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina in 1947 and retired in 1979.

His major work was in the areas of probability limit theorems, large-scale behavior of statistical tests, probability inequalities and approximation errors. He developed U-statistics, known as unbiased estimator statistics.

He was a member of the Royal Statistical Society of London, the American Statistical Association, the Institue of Mathematical Statistics and the National Academy of Sciences.

His brother is his only survivor.