Ladislaus Bortkiewicz

Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
Born	(1868-08-07)August 7, 1868 Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia
Died	July 15, 1931(1931-07-15) (aged 62) Berlin, Germany
Alma mater	University of Strasbourg, Habilitation 1895 University of Göttingen, Ph.D. 1893 University of Saint Petersburg 1890
Known for	Poisson distribution Transformation problem
Scientific career
Fields	Economist, Statistician
Institutions	University of Berlin 1901–31 Professor Alexandrowskii Lyceum 1899–00 Russian Railways 1897–01 University of Strasbourg, 1895–1897 Privatdozent
Doctoral advisor	Georg Friedrich Knapp (Habil.) Wilhelm Lexis (Ph.D.)
Doctoral students	Wassily Leontief

Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz (ru:Владислав Иосифович Борткевич, pl:Władysław Bortkiewicz, August 7, 1868 – July 15, 1931) was a Russian economist and statistician of Polish descent (not Polish, but Lithuanian because his family name is of Lithuanian origin Bartkus or Bartkevicius, the root 'Bart' comes from Lithuanian word 'barti'=chastize), who lived most of his professional life in Germany. He was of minor nobility: for his earlier publication he used the German styled "von" as Ladislaus von Bortkewitsch, for his later publications he changed it slightly to Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz.

Bortkiewicz was born in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia (today Russia) where he graduated in law in 1890.

In 1898 he published a book about the Poisson distribution, titled The Law of Small Numbers. In this book he first noted that events with low frequency in a large population follow a Poisson distribution even when the probabilities of the events varied. It was that book that made the Prussian horse-kick data famous. The data give the number of soldiers killed by being kicked by a horse each year in each of 14 cavalry corps over a 20-year period. Bortkiewicz showed that those numbers follow a Poisson distribution. The book also examined data on child-suicides. Some historians of mathematics have even argued that the Poisson distribution should have been named the "Bortkiewicz distribution."

Bortkiewicz attempted to predict how many pieces of artillery would overheat in an intensive battle. He failed in this because of his limited knowledge of thermodynamics and metallic composition of cannons.

In political economy, Bortkiewicz is important for his analysis of Karl Marx's reproduction schema in the last two volumes of Capital. Bortkiewicz identified a transformation problem in Marx's work which, if proven, would profoundly undermine Marx's claim to have provided a consistent account of capitalist economics. This work provided the basis of major elaborations by Joseph Schumpeter and Paul Sweezy among others.

Bortkiewicz died in Berlin, Germany.

Major publications

• Die mittlere Lebensdauer. Die Methoden ihrer Bestimmung und ihr Verhältnis zur Sterblichkeitsmessung. Gustav Fischer, Jena 1893 (Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum)
• "Review of Léon Walras, Éléments d'économie politique pure, 2e édit.", 1890, Revue d'économie politique
• Das Gesetz der kleinen Zahlen, 1898
• "Wertrechnung und Preisrechnung im Marxschen System", 1907, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.
• "On the Correction of Marx's Fundamental Theoretical Construction in the Third Volume of Capital."
• Die Iterationen, spanish version 1917
• Value and Price in the Marxian System, 1952, IEP.

References

• Joseph Schumpeter: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, Economic Journal, Vol. 42 (1932), pp. 338–340, reprinted in: Ten great economists from Marx to Keynes (New York, 1960), pp. 302–305
• Emil Julius Gumbel: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 2 (New York, 1968), pp. 128–131.
• Paul A. Samuelson. Resolving a Historical Confusion in Population Analysis. Human Biology, 48, 1976: S. 559–580.

External links

• Biographical sketch on the web site of the University of St. Andrews (in Scotland)
• New School: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz