Person: Lah, Ivo

Ivo Lah was a Slovenian mathematician and actuary who wworked in both matematics and statistics.

Before finishing high school Ivo Lah volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army to defend the western borders of Slovenia.
As a representative of the Society of Actuaries of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia Ivo Lah attended the International Congress of Actuaries in Rome (1934) and in Paris (1937).
Due to his scientific publications Ivo Lah became a correspondent of member of several international institutions from Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Germany and France.
Since 1932 when Ivo Lah became in charge of Statistics of Social Security in Slovenia he connected his work with studies at the University of Ljubljana.
Ivo Lah worked in practical Demographics and Statistics.
His main work is a trilingual book "Racunske osnovice zivotnog osiguranja" Ⓣ(Basic life insurance calculation) written in Croatian, Russian and French and published in Zagreb in 1947.
Ivo Lah was able to save some copies of the book.
Ivo Lah was a prolific writer and he published several hundred newspaper articles.
His most important mathematical result, published in 1955, is the so-called "Lah identity" where he shows how the rising powers can be expressed in terms of falling powers.
The unsigned Lah numbers L(n,k)L(n, k)L(n,k) have an interesting combinatorial interpretation.

Born 5 September 1896, Strukljeva vas near Cerknica, Austrian Empire (now Slovenia). Died 23 March 1979, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia).

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Slovenia

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

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