Person: Bortkiewicz, Ladislaus Josephowitsch

Ladislaus Bortkiewicz was a Russian economist and statistician. He made contributions to mathematical economics.

Joseph Bortkiewicz came from the Russian nobility.
An unfortunate argument with an Italian statistician Gini, who accused Bortkiewicz of plagiarism, led to an unhappy episode near the end of Bortkiewicz's life.
Bortkiewicz was interested in the law of small numbers and he used the divergence coefficient Q, deducing its expectation and standard deviation.
Other areas to which Bortkiewicz applied his statistical methods include radioactivity (1913), order statistics, and applications to legal studies.
Bortkiewicz was critical of the approach of Karl Pearson to statistics.
This, claimed Bortkiewicz, was worthless.
Bortkiewicz does not get any less obscure as he goes on.
Bortkiewicz received many honours including membership of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Statistical Society, the American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute.

Born 7 August 1868, St Petersburg, Russia. Died 15 July 1931, Berlin, Germany.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Russia, Statistics

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive