Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz: a scientific biography

Oscar Sheynin

Antiquitates Mathematicae, Tome 5 (2011).

Résumé

A Russian version of this paper is   Шейнин (2008b).  Vladislav Iosifovich Bortkevich (August 7, 1868 -- July 15, 1931) was born in Petersburg into a family of Russified Polish nobility. After moving to Germany he changed his name and became Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (his name is abbreviated as V. I. or L. B. in the paper, respectively). His mother was Helene, née von Rokicki, and father, Iosif Ivanovich, a colonel in the Russian army, later a notary public and teacher of mathematics in a gymnasium. V. I. finished a humanistic Gymnasium and he was graduated from the law faculty of Petersburg University in 1890. In the same source von Bortkiewicz called himself a Roman Catholic, but he never mentioned religious matters in published works or letters known to the author. In 1898 he published a book about the Poisson distribution, titled The Law of Small Numbers. His papers, including a voluminous correspondence file (some 1,000 letters 1876-1931), are deposited at Uppsala University in Sweden, except for his correspondence with Léon Walras which went into the collection of the Walras scholar William Jaffe in the USA. Bortkiewicz died in Berlin, Germany.

Source: