Samuel Kotz (30 August 1930, Harbin, China –16 March 2010, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA) was a Professor and Research Scholar in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science at The George Washington University since 1997 until his death on March 16, 2010. He was an author or editor of several standard reference works in statistics and probability theory.

Samuel Kotz studied electrical engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology, graduating with honors in 1946. He obtained an M.A. with honors inMathematics in 1956 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Statistics from Cornell University.

In 1964 he joined the University of Toronto as Associate Professor. He then moved to Temple University, Philadelphia as a Professor of Mathematics in 1967 and the University of Maryland, College Park as a Professor in the College of Business and Management in 1979. In 1997 he joined the Operations Research Department at George Washington University. His visiting positions included Bowling Green State University, Bucknell University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Luleå University of Technology, Tel Aviv University, and University of Guelph.

He and Norman L. Johnson founded the Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences (1982–1999) of which he was editor-in-chief. He was also a co-author of the four-volume Compendium on Statistical Distributions (First Edition 1969-1972, Second Edition 1993-1997).^[1] Over the course of his career he authored or co-authored a total of three Russian-English scientific dictionaries, over three dozen volumes/books/monographs in the field of statistics and quality control and over 280 papers.^[2]

Samuel Kotz was awarded honorary doctorates from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1982, University of Athens in 1995 and Bowling Green State Universityin 1997. He was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

Samuel Kotz has an Erdős number of 2.