Agresti earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the
University of Rochester in 1968. He earned his doctorate in statistics from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972. His doctoral advisor was
Stephen Stigler and his thesis work was on
stochastic processes. He was a professor of statistics for many years at the University of Florida, from 1972 until his retirement in 2010 as a Distinguished Professor. He was also a visiting professor at the department of statistics at
Harvard University for several years. Notable doctoral students include
Ivy Liu and
Brent Coull. He wrote the textbook
Categorical Data Analysis during a sabbatical year at
Imperial College. According to Scholar Google, his books and articles have been cited more than 85,000 times. He has taught short courses about categorical data analysis for 30 years at universities around the world, including at several Italian universities, and in 2017 became a dual citizen of Italy and the United States. ==Honors and awards==