Early life Born on 8 November 1924 in
Hannibal, Missouri, Hogg served three years in the
U.S. Navy from 1943 through 1946. In 1947, he graduated from the
University of Illinois with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. With the goal of becoming an
actuary, Hogg matriculated at the mathematics department of the
University of Iowa (then the "
State University of Iowa"). However, Hogg studied statistics under Allen Craig, who became his mentor and helped him obtain a job teaching statistics at the Mathematics Department. Hogg earned his Ph.D. 1950 under Allen Craig. After graduating, Hogg remained at the Mathematics Department, where he remained to become a long-serving professor. Hogg's second paper on the topic of Basu's theorem was never published, because of a negative report by an anonymous referee in 1953. Later, Basu refers "to Hogg and Craig (1956) for several interesting uses [of
Basu's theorem] in proving results in distribution theory".
Collaboration and friendship with Allen Craig The textbook "Hogg and Craig" was innovative, particularly in emphasizing
sufficient statistics: Sufficient statistics were treated not only for
parametric families but also for nonparametric probability distributions: In particular, the sufficiency and
completeness of the
order statistics from a
continuous distribution were treated. Another innovation was the systematic derivation of the distributions of functions of several random variables by using the
change-of-variable method. As noted before, Craig was Hogg's mentor, helping him to obtain a teaching position while a graduate student and also supervising his thesis. Later, after Hogg had graduated, Craig became a close friend, and served as the
best man at Hogg's wedding and later as the "
godparent" to each of Hogg's four children. Indeed, Hogg's son Allen was
named after Craig.
Chairing a new Department of Statistics In 1965 Hogg became the founding chair of the new Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, and he remained as the chair for nineteen years. At Iowa, Hogg held other positions, including Chair of the Quality Management and Productivity Program and the Hanson Chair of Manufacturing Productivity. After serving 51 years as an instructor at the University of Iowa, Hogg became Professor Emeritus in 2001. ==Statistics education==