Person: Cramér, Harald

Harald Cramér was a Swedish mathematician, actuary and statistician, specializing in mathematical statistics and probabilistic number theory.

Cramér's first five publications are written jointly with the chemist H von Euler during 1913-14.
Also influenced by G H Hardy, Cramér's research resulted in the award of a PhD in 1917 for his thesis On a class of Dirichlet series.
In 1919 Cramér was appointed assistant professor at the University of Stockholm.
It was not only through his work on number theory that Cramér was led towards probability theory.
Cramér became interested in the rigorous mathematical formulation of probability in work of the French and Russian mathematicians such as Paul Lévy, Sergei Bernstein, and Aleksandr Khinchin in the early 1930s, but in particular the axiomatic approach of Kolmogorov.
By the mid 1930s Cramér's attention had turned to look at the approach of the English and American statisticians such as Fisher, Neyman and Egon Pearson (Karl Pearson's son).
The result of Cramér's work is a masterly exposition of the mathematical methods of modern statistics that set the standard that others have since sought to follow.
In 1950 Cramér became the President of Stockholm University.
Despite holding this post until he retired in 1961, Cramér still found time to undertake research despite the large administrative burden placed on him.
Cramér's Collected Works were published in 1994.
There have been many tributes to Cramér.

Born 25 September 1893, Stockholm, Sweden. Died 5 October 1985, Stockholm, Sweden.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Sweden

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

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