Before becoming a professor at Appalachian State University in 1993, Dr. Alan Arnholt enlisted in the Army in 1981 and received an enlisted reserve appointment in 1982 to the United States Military Academy, graduating with the class of 1986. He served as regular officer in the U.S. Army until 1990. Arnholt spend the summer of 1995 working for SEAGATE technologies as a reliability engineer.

“I was attracted to the different types of problems statisticians get to work with, and teaching that to students was very appealing,” said Arnholt, who teaches in the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

“I find it interesting, personally, too. There’s a famous statistician who said, ‘Statisticians get to play in everybody’s back yard.’ You can come in and help people out with whatever they are doing mathematically.”

Arnholt has co-authored a textbook and its second edition, “Probability and Statistics with R.”

The book project started when he spent a year as an exchange scholar at The Public University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain during the 2003-04 academic year. Arnholt started translating a Spanish statistics textbook into English. After seeing some ways to develop the textbook further, he ended up co-writing a new book entirely.

He and his co-authors from The Public University of Navarre published the first edition of “Probability and Statistics with R” in 2008. Not long after, they began working on the second edition, which was published in July 2015.

Arnholt’s first visit to The Public University of Navarre was the start of an exchange between that school and Appalachian. Since then, Arnholt has returned and taken his daughter with him.

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