Samuel Stanley Wilks (June 17, 1906 – March 7, 1964) was an American mathematician and academic who played an important role in the development of mathematical statistics, especially in regard to practical applications.
Wilks assembled an advisory board for the journal that included major figures in statistics and probability, among them Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and Egon Pearson.
Both during and after the War he had a profound impact on the application of statistical methods to all aspects of military planning.
He also conducted work on unit-weighted regression, proving the idea that under a wide variety of common conditions, almost all sets of weights will yield composites that are very highly correlated (Wilks, 1938), a result that has been dubbed Wilks's theorem (Ree, Carretta, & Earles, 1998).
From the start of his career, Wilks favored a strong focus on practical applications for the increasingly abstract field of mathematical statistics; he also influenced other researchers, notably John Tukey, in a similar direction.