Paul Dixon Minton was born in Dallas, Texas, the third of four sons in the family of William M. and Addie Evelyn Croft Minton. Having grown up in the economically difficult times of the Great Depression, he was able to attend college only because he received an “emergency scholarship” to attend Southern Methodist University (SMU). The university was experiencing its own difficulties, struggling to fill classes, and decided to offer such scholarships to young Dallasites who had done well in high school, were recommended by their principals, and could not otherwise afford to go to school.
Minton earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from SMU, a school to which he would return later to found and direct a department of statistics. His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which time he worked as a cryptanalyst for the FBI. Following the war, he returned to Dallas as an instructor and graduate student at SMU in the Department of Mathematics. It was at that point that Minton was introduced to probability and statistics by Edwin Mouzon, who had, himself, written a dissertation on statistics at the University of Illinois. After completing his master’s degree, Minton was encouraged by Mouzon to continue his graduate studies in the new program in statistics at The University of North Carolina.
Minton earned a PhD in statistics from North Carolina State University under the tutelage of Gertrude Cox, during the time the Institute of Statistics of the Greater University of North Carolina consisted of the Department of Mathematical Statistics at UNC Chapel Hill and the Department of Experimental Statistics at NC State in Raleigh. Many famous statisticians were either faculty members or visitors when Minton was a student there, including R. A. Fisher, Harold Hotelling, William Cochran, Jacob Wolfowitz, Herbert Ellis Robbins, Richard L. Anderson, Raj Chandra Bose, and others too numerous to mention.
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