George Udny Yule

George Udny Yule, usually known as Udny Yule, was a British statistician, particularly known for the Yule distribution and for proposing the preferential attachment model for random graphs. He was born on 18 February 1871 at Beech Hill, a house in Morham near Haddington, Scotland, and died in Cambridge, England, in 1951. He was educated at Winchester College and at University College London, where he read engineering, and spent a year in Bonn doing research in experimental physics under Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. He returned to University College to work as a demonstrator for Karl Pearson and followed him into statistics. In 1911 he wrote the influential textbook Introduction to the Theory of Statistics, and in 1912 he moved to Cambridge University to a newly created lectureship in statistics, remaining there for the rest of his life.