by Frank Yates, rev. Alan Yoshioka
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Yule, George Udny (1871-1951), statistician, was born at Morham, near Haddington, East Lothian, on 18 February 1871, the youngest of the three children surviving infancy of Sir George Udny Yule (1813-1886) [see under Yule, Sir Henry] of the Indian Civil Service, and his wife, Henrietta Peach, daughter of Captain Robert Boileau Pemberton, of the Indian army. Sir Henry Yule, the geographer of India, was his uncle.
Yule was educated at Bayswater, London, at Dunchurch near Rugby, and at Winchester College; he was intended for the Royal Engineers but objected, and instead studied civil engineering at University College, London, which he entered at the age of sixteen. As there was then no engineering degree he left after three years without graduating. He spent two years as an apprentice in private engineering works, but in 1892 he went to study physics at Bonn University. While at University College he had become acquainted with Karl Pearson, then professor of applied mathematics, and in 1893 Pearson offered him a job as demonstrator. He was promoted to assistant professor of applied mathematics in 1896; and this marked the beginning of his interest in statistics.
In 1899 Yule married May Winifred, daughter of William Hayman Cummings, principal of the Guildhall School of Music, but the marriage was not a success and in 1912 it was annulled. There were no children. In consequence of his marriage he gave up his post in University College and took up more remunerative work as assistant to Sir Philip Magnus, superintendent of the department of technology of the City and Guilds Institute. Yule was, however, able to keep up his statistical work in the evenings and in 1902 he was appointed Newmarch lecturer in statistics at University College, holding the two posts concurrently until 1909. His new duties included lecturing in the evenings to a small class, largely of civil servants, and these lectures provided the foundation of his Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (1911), which became a standard textbook and by 1932 had run through ten editions and been translated into Czech in 1926. Revised in collaboration with Maurice Kendall, it achieved widespread popularity.
In 1912 Yule accepted the newly established university lectureship in statistics at Cambridge and concurrently became statistician to the school of agriculture. He was made a member of St John's College in 1913, elected a fellow in 1922, was college director of studies in natural sciences from 1923 to 1935, and lived in college for almost the whole of the rest of his life. In 1915-19 he was seconded as a statistician to the director of army contracts and later worked with the Ministry of Food; he was appointed CBE in 1918.
Yule had great influence on the early development of modern statistics, particularly on experimentation in biology and agriculture, and analysis of vital and industrial statistics. His main contributions in the theoretical field were concerned with regression and correlation, with association, particularly in 2×2 contingency tables, with time-series, with Mendelian inheritance, and with epidemiology. He was elected FRS in 1921. He played a very active part in the affairs of various scientific societies, such as the Royal Anthropological Institute and in particular the Royal Statistical Society, of which he was honorary secretary (1907-19) and president (1924-6); he was awarded the society's Guy gold medal in 1911. He was elected to honorary membership by the statistical societies of America, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and contributed numerous papers to the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Biometrika, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Yule did not regard himself as a great mathematician, but he had a very clear idea of what could and could not be accomplished by mathematical analysis. In his early years he was a good friend of Pearson, and had Pearson been more accommodating they might have become an ideal team, for in many ways their abilities were complementary. But as Yule wrote in his obituary of Pearson, 'Those who left him and began to think for themselves were apt, as happened painfully in more instances than one, to find that after a divergence of opinion the maintenance of friendly relations became difficult, after express criticism impossible' (Obits. FRS, 2, 1936, 101).
Yule was a quiet and unassuming man, appreciated for his wide knowledge and interests and his kindly and gentle nature. In politics he was a strong Conservative. He was not ambitious, regarding freedom to pursue his intellectual interests as of more importance than name or fortune. He was a man of varied and surprising attainments: he had marked literary interests, and composed humorous verses in Latin and English. In his fifties he developed a keen interest in motoring, with a taste for fast driving; and on his retirement he took up flying, bought his own aeroplane, and obtained his pilot's 'certificate A' when nearly sixty-one. When nearing retirement he resumed the study of Latin with a view to reading in the original De imitatione Christi, St Augustine's Confessions, and Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae. The first of these led to consideration of the authorship controversy and to other works of Thomas à Kempis. This suggested to him the idea of using statistical methods to provide evidence of authorship and in 1944 he published The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary.
After his retirement Yule continued to take an active part in college affairs, but in 1935 his heart gave serious trouble and thereafter he was compelled to be physically inactive. He died in the Evelyn Nursing Home, Cambridge, on 26 June 1951.
FRANK YATES, rev. ALAN YOSHIOKA
Sources
F. Yates, Obits. FRS, 8 (1952-3), 309-23
F. L. E., 'George Udny Yule', The Eagle, 55 (1952-3), 89-94
M. G. Kendall, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: series A, 115 (1952), 156-61
The Times (28 June 1951)
The record of the Royal Society of London, 4th edn (1940)
CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1951)
personal knowledge (1971)
Archives
BL OIOC, papers of and relating to him, MS Eur. E 357 | UCL, corresp. with Karl Pearson
Likenesses
Elliott & Fry, photograph, c.1930, repro. in F. L. E., 'George Udny Yule', 89
H. Lamb, drawing, St John Cam.
photograph, repro. in Yates, Obits. FRS, facing p. 309
photograph, RS [see illus.]
Wealth at death
£27,288 12s. 8d.: probate, 17 Oct 1951, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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