[1] Gustav Elfving earned excellent grades at the Svenska normallyceum i Helsingfors, a Helsinki gymnasium for Swedish-speaking boys, from which he graduated in 1926.

The grieving parents of his fiancée helped Elfving contact the Danish Geodetic Institute, which hired him as the mathematician for a cartographic expedition to Western Greenland in the summer of 1935.

[4] Heavy rains forced the expedition to remain sheltered in their tents for three days, during which Elfving started to think about the best locations to take measurements for least squares estimation.

[1][2][9] While accompanying a surveying expedition to western Greenland, extended and intense rains left Elving with three days in his tent, during which time he considered the best locations of observations to estimate parameters of linear models.

[16][17] As a Professor at the University of Helsinki, Elfving was responsible for writing Finnish language texts, which were used for decades.

Elja Arjas is known for his work on inference on stochastic processes and reliability theory, as well as for his supervision of Esa Nummelin and Hannu Oja.

[21] Johann Fellman has studied optimal designs for nonsingular or nondifferentiable information functions as well economic theory, and genetics (particularly the frequency of twin births) and for his supervision of Kenneth Nordström and Katarina Juselius.

[24] He served on the editorial boards of three international journals: Probability Theory and Related Fields (1962–1975), The Annals of Mathematical Statistics (1964–1967), and Mathematica Scandinavica (1953–1972).

[1] Elfving had a deep sense of honor and propriety: When he resigned from the editorial boards following decades of service, he requested that he not be sent complimentary issues of the journals; when he failed to accomplish high levels of research, he offered to return the funding to the granting agency.