George Yule was born on February 18, 1871 near Haddington, Scotland. He was a professor of applied mathematics at University College London, and later a lecturer in statistics at Cambridge University. During World War I, Yule worked as a statistician for the British government.
Yule made important contributions to the method of least squares, regression, and especially to correlation. His book On the Theory of Correlation was published in 1897. Yule was interested in the statistical analysis of literature, and wrote The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary, which was published in 1944.
Yule died on June 26, 1951 in Cambridge, England.