Stuart A. Rice was born in Wadena, Minnesota, November 21, 1889. He earned a master's degree from the University of Washington in 1915 and a PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1924. In his dissertation, he proposed a concept to measure the degree of agreement within a voting body, which is now known as the Rice index. He was instructor and assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth College (1923–1926), and professor of sociology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania (1926–1933). In 1933 he served as president of the American Statistical Association.
