Ted Hill (mathematician)


Theodore Preston Hill is an American mathematician. He is known for his research on mathematical probability theory, in particular for his work on Benford's law, and for his work in the theories of optimal stopping and fair division, in particular the Hill-Beck land division problem.
Born in Flatbush, New York, he studied at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and Stanford University. After graduating from the U.S. Army Ranger School and serving as an Army Captain in the Combat Engineers of the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, he returned to study mathematics at the University of Göttingen, the University of California at Berkeley, and as NATO/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University.
He spent most of his career as a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with temporary appointments at Washington University, Tel Aviv University, the University of Hawaii, the University of Göttingen, the University of Costa Rica, the Free University of Amsterdam, the Mexican Centre for Mathematical Research, and as Gauss Professor in the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Georgia Institute of Technology, Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico, and Research Scholar in Residence at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
A paper on the variability hypothesis by Hill and Sergei Tabachnikov was accepted but not published by The Mathematical Intelligencer; a later version authored by Hill alone was accepted by The New York Journal of Mathematics and retracted after publication. This was a result of political activists who were threatened by the conclusions of this paper. Due to these actions, the paper received much wider attention thanks to the Streissand effect.

Selected publications

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