Cyril Hoyt, the author of Hoyt's coefficient of reliability, was a long-time member of the University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

 Department of Educational Psychology. Quiet, absorbed in abstract thought during his lectures on the theory of measurement and the theory of scaling, self-effacing to the degree that he never mentioned in class his major contribution to psychometrics

Psychometrics

Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational measurement...

 (Hoyt, 1941), leaving that to others. His modesty is perhaps one of the reasons that the generalization of the Kuder-Richardson's (1937) formulation of the coefficient of internal consistency reliability to a continuous case is generally ascribed to Lee Cronbach

Cronbach's alpha

Cronbach's \alpha is a coefficient of reliability. It is commonly used as a measure of the internal consistency or reliability of a psychometric test score for a sample of examinees. It was first named alpha by Lee Cronbach in 1951, as he had intended to continue with further coefficients...

(1951), even though this generalization was already made a decade earlier (Hoyt, 1941). Professor Hoyt retired in 1974.