Harold Hotelling
Mathematician
Pioneer of modern statistics who was also an influential economic theorist. He was also a longtime Mathematics Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received the North Carolina Award for contributions to science in 1972.
After completing his doctorate in mathematics at Princeton, he struck up a correspondence with fellow mathematician R.A. Fisher, inspiring his later work.
While working at Columbia University he sponsored refugees from European anti-semitism and Nazism by putting them on his research team.
He was born in Fulda, Minnesota.
He was the teacher of another highly influential economist, Milton Friedman.