Harald Ludvig Westergaard

Harald Westergaard was born in Copenhagen and apart from a period studying in England and Germany in 1877-78 he lived there all his life.

His subject at the University of Copenhagen was mathematics but he became interested in economics and, while he was in England, he seems to have met William Stanley Jevons.

His international reputation was made by the publication of Die Lehre von der Mortalität und Morbilität (1881).

In the Introduction, Westergaard remarks, "For a long while ... the calculus of probabilities had less influence on statistics than might have been expected, the authors confining themselves to abstract theories which had little or nothing to do with reality."

The obituary in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society of London, begins, "By [his] death Europe has lost her senior statistician" and ends, "This is not the place to write at length about his personal charm, marked by simplicity, helpfulness and friendliness; but it was this as much as his intellectual eminence that gave him a unique place in the society of economists and statisticians."