He proved that the "Law of Small Numbers" could be applied statistically: Who is Ladislaus Bortkiewicz?

(1868-1931) Polish-born German economist. He made important contributions to the application of statistical methods to social sciences. Ladislaus Bortkiewicz was born on August 7, 1868, in St. Petersburg, and died on 15 July 1931 in Berlin. He came from a Polish family. He studied law and political science in St Petersburg. He was sent to Germany by the Russian Ministry of Education to continue his education. W Lexis at the University of Göttingen, G.F. He became a student of Knapp. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Strassburg in 1895, he returned to Russia and worked for a while at the Ministry of Transport. After teaching at the Alexander Lycee in St Petersburg between 1899-1901, he went back to Germany. He started working as a professor at the University of Berlin and continued his studies there until the end of his life.

Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz (7 August 1868 – 15 July 1931) was a Russian economist and statistician of Polish ancestry. He wrote a book showing how the Poisson distribution, a discrete probability distribution, can be useful in applied statistics, and he made contributions to mathematical economics. 

Bortkiewicz focused his studies on mathematics and statistics. He made important contributions to the use of statistical methods in the field of social sciences. He particularly focused on population, income, and insurance statistics. He conducted research on the mathematical "expectation method" and indices. Bortkiewicz, who also had important works on probability theory, proved in 1908 that the "Law of Small Numbers", which had been put forward mathematically by SD Poisson, could be applied statistically. The “Law of Large Numbers”, which is used as a common method to generalize and determine common aspects of collective events, which are generally under the influence of coincidences in the field of social sciences, was first put forward by Jacob Bernoulli. The "Law of Small Numbers" was a method that gave approximate values to explain rare cases. Thus, the usage areas of the two laws were complementary to each other.

Bortkiewicz also worked on the "problem of transformation" that emerged as a result of Marx's attempt to integrate the value system with the price system. In order for his labor theory of value to gain an economic meaning, Marx tried to reach a price system from a value system determined according to the amount of input and output and real wages and to determine half production prices and income distribution. The model he built to transform the value system into the price system, calculating the produced outputs with prices and the inputs with values in the product prices equation, led to debates that continued for many years after his death under the name of "transformation problem".

Bortkiewicz established a three-section model in order to simultaneously determine the profit rate and prices on the "conversion problem". In this model, the price of luxury goods is taken as the basic unit, and the relative prices and income distribution in the system are determined simultaneously.

Although it works under limited assumptions, Bortkiewicz's solution is important as it is the first step in this field.