Leo Törnqvist | |
|---|---|
| Born | Leo Waldemar Törnqvist (1911-02-14)14 February 1911 |
| Died | 18 April 1983(1983-04-18) (aged 72) |
| Known for | Törnqvist index |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Statistics |
| Institutions | University of Helsinki |
Leo Waldemar Törnqvist (14 February 1911 – 18 April 1983) was one of the first professors of statistics in Finland, and the first to achieve international recognition. He taught at theUniversity of Helsinki from 1943 to 1974, and developed techniques that are used in official price and productivity statistics.[1][2]
Törnqvist was born on 14 February 1911 inJeppo, a Swedish-speaking village in Finland. He studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry atÅbo Akademi University inTurku, where his interests shifted to economics and statistics under the influence of Swedish economist Arthur Montgomery. He finished his studies in Turku in 1933 and continued with graduate work in mathematics atStockholm University, earning a doctorate in 1937 under the supervision ofHarald Cramér andGunnar Myrdal.[2]
After a short-term teaching position atÅbo Akademi University from 1937 to 1938, he began his career working for the Finnish railway service from 1938 until 1943. He was appointed as an associate professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki in 1943 and promoted to full professor in 1950. In the early 1950s he visited researchers in the US and, in the early 1960s, worked as a consultant for the United Nations in Indonesia.[2]
He died on 18 April 1983.[2]
Törnqvist developed an approach to creating weightedprice indexes across discrete time periods using weighted averages of growth rates in prices where the weights were quantity averages across the two periods, in work he did with theBank of Finland published in 1936.[3][4] TheseTörnqvist indexes are used in official price and productivity statistics in many countries.[5][6][7][8]In a 1949 work,[9] he also made "the first serious attempt to describe population forecasting from a stochastic point of view",[10] providing "seminal works" inBayesian inference indemography.[11]
As a professor at the University of Helsinki, his students included economistTimo Teräsvirta.[12] His student Vieno Rajaoja was the first Finnish woman to earn a doctorate in statistics, in 1958.[2]
Törnqvist was elected member of theFinnish Society of Sciences and Letters in 1956, fellow of theEconometric Society in 1951, and member of theInternational Statistical Institute in 1956. He was decorated Commander of theOrder of the Lion of Finland in 1961, and given honorary doctorates by the University of Helsinki in 1971 and by Åbo Akademi University in 1978.[2]
In about 1981, Törnqvist bought aVIC-20 and asked his daughter Anna’s son,Linus Torvalds, to help him program it. Törnqvist wrote outBASIC language programs, and grandson Linus, aged about eleven, typed them in. "He wanted me to share in the experience [and] get me interested in math," wrote Torvalds later.[13] These were Linus's first programming experiences. Ten years later, Torvalds began to write theLinux kernel.
Leo Törnqvist's brother was diplomatErik Törnqvist.[1] His son was the nuclear physicistNils Arthur Törnqvist [fi] (1938–2018).[14]
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)| International | |
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