Walter Francis Willcox
Walter Francis Willcox was an American statistician. He was born in Reading, Massachusetts, to William Henry Willcox and Anne Holmes Goodenow. He was graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1880, from Amherst College in 1884 with an A.B., and in 1888 received an A.M. degree from Amherst College. He received an LL.B degree and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. In 1906 he received an honorary LL.D. degree from Amherst College.Life
Willcox was a Cornell University faculty member from 1891 to 1931 within the President White School of History and Political Science. He held the presidency of the American Statistical Association from 1911 to 1912 and of the American Economic Association in 1915. As well as essays and magazine articles, he published The Divorce Problem, A Study in Statistics, and Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables, twelfth census. He contributed the "Negroes in the United States" subsection to the "Negro" article in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
Willcox initiated the first statistics course at Cornell in 1892, one of the earliest university courses in statistics in the United States, and one among 16 universities with such courses in the 1890s. His research interest was in vital statistics. Emil Julius Gumbel described his body of work, collected in Studies in American Demography, as "the type of old-fashioned writings which will continue to be of value notwithstanding all progress achieved in mathematical statistics."
In 1911, Willcox claimed there would be "no children in the United States under five years of age" by the year 2020. Perpetuating ideas of race suicide, Willcox erroneously explained that the United States' birth rate meant that importing babies from France would be the only option for maintaining population levels.Publications
