Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz: Statistician, economist, and a European intellectual

Wolfgang Härdle and Annette B. Vogt

No 2014-015, SFB 649 Discussion Papers from Humboldt University Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649: Economic Risk

Abstract: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (1868 - 1931) was a European statistician. His scientific work covered theoretical economics, stochastics, mathematical statistics and radiology, today we would call him a cross disciplinary scientist. With his clear views on mathematical principles with their applications in these fields he stood in conflict with the mainstream economic schools in Germany at the dawn of the 20th century. He had many prominent students (Gumbel, Leontief, Freudenberg among them) and he carved out the path of modern statistical thinking. He was a true European intellectual with a career path from St. Petersburg via Gottingen to Straßburg and finally the Berliner Universität, now Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is known for the precise calibration of insurance claims applying the - at that time hardly known - Poisson distribution to Prussian horse kick and child suicide data. He proposed a simple solution to the Marxian transformation problem and wrote numerous articles and books on the mathematical treatment of statistical (including radiological physical) data. In this article we sketch his life and work and point out the prominent role that he has in today's statistical thinking.

Keywords: History of science; Statistics; Horse kicks; Bortkiewicz (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B14 B16 D02 N01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/93226/1/780042700.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz—Statistician, Economist and a European Intellectual (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:sfb649:sfb649dp2014-015

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SFB 649 Discussion Papers from Humboldt University Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649: Economic Risk Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().