Walter F. (Walter Francis) Willcox

Born in 1861, Walter Francis Willcox was an American economist and statistician whose long career became closely tied to Cornell University. Cornell records describe him as a professor of economics and statistics, and later dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; the university has also credited him as the first professor of statistics in the United States.

His work focused on population, mortality, census data, and other social and political questions that could be studied through numbers. That combination of economics, public affairs, and statistical method helped make him an important early figure in bringing statistical thinking into American academic life.

Willcox lived an unusually long life, dying in 1964 at the age of 102. His papers, preserved at Cornell, reflect a career that reached from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, covering both his scholarly work and his engagement with major issues of his time.