[2] Yule was born at Beech Hill, a house in Morham near Haddington, Scotland and died in Cambridge, England.

After a year in Bonn doing research in experimental physics under Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, Yule returned to University College in 1893 to work as a demonstrator for Karl Pearson, one of his former teachers.

Yule progressed to an assistant professorship but he left in 1899 to a better-paid position as secretary to an examination board, working under Philip Magnus at the City and Guilds Institute.

[5] In 1902 Yule became Newmarch lecturer in statistics at University College, a position he held together with his post at the City and Guilds Institute.

He continued to publish articles and also wrote an influential textbook, Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (1911), based on his lectures.

His flow of publications almost ceased but, in the 1940s he found new interests, one of which led to a book, The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary.

Yule was a prolific writer, the highlight of his publications being perhaps the textbook Introduction to the Theory of Statistics, which went through fourteen editions and was published in several languages.

In 1922, J. C. Willis published Age and Area, based on botanical field work in Ceylon, where he studied the distributional patterns of the Ceylonese vascular plants in great detail.

He compiled a table of the number of existent species in each genus of flowering plants, and the same for the Rubiaceae, and for the Chrysomelid beetles.

Frank Yates culminated his 1952 obituary of Yule by saying: “To summarize we may, I think, justly conclude that though Yule did not fully develop any completely new branches of statistical theory, he took the first steps in many directions which were later to prove fruitful lines for further progress… He can indeed rightly claim to be one of the pioneers of modern statistics”.

[11] Yule made important contributions to the theory and practice of correlation, regression, and association, as well as to time series analysis.

He pioneered the use of preferential attachment stochastic processes to explain the origin of power law distribution.