Post by Pat Ballew

1931 Ladislaus Josephowitsch Bortkiewic (7 August 1868 – 15 July 1931) studied law at St Petersburg, graduating in 1890 and then went on to study political economy and statistics for a year of postgraduate work. He studied at Strasbourg from 1891 to 1892, then at Göttingen under Lexis in 1892, going on to also study at Vienna and Leipzig. After submitting a dissertation, he was awarded a doctorate in 1893 from Göttingen. After lecturing in statistics and actuarial science from 1895 to 1897 as a privatdozent in Strasbourg he went to St Petersburg where he was a clerk in the Railway Office from 1897 until 1901. However, during this time he returned to academic life, teaching statistics from 1899 until December 1900 at the Alexandrowskii Lyceum. Then in 1901 he was appointed as an extraordinary professor of statistics at the University of Berlin. Bortkiewicz became an ordinary professor of statistics and political economy at the University of Berlin in 1920 and he spent the rest of his life there. 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 worked on mathematical statistics and applications to actuarial science and political economy. His work on actuarial science was largely concerned with mortality tables. He examined life expectancy in an increasing population and showed in 1893, contrary to what had previously been believed, that life expectancy in such a population could only be computed from mortality tables and was not a function of the observed birth rate and death rate. He published on mortality rates again in publication of 1904 and 1911 where he examined methods to compare mortality rates. Good argues that the Poisson distribution should have been named the von Bortkiewicz distribution. Bortkiewicz was interested in the law of small numbers and he used the divergence coefficient Q, deducing its expectation and standard deviation. He published a work The Law of Small Numbers in 1898. In this he was the first to note that events with low frequency in a large population followed a Poisson distribution even when the probabilities of the events varied.Other areas to which Bortkiewicz applied his statistical methods include radioactivity (1913), order statistics, and applications to legal studies. *SAU