Lindeberg was son of a teacher at the Helsinki Polytechnical Institute and at an early age showed mathematical talent and interest.
His early interests were in partial differential equations and the calculus of variations but from 1920 he worked in probability and statistics.
However, their approaches were quite different; Lindeberg's was based on a convolution argument while Lyapunov used the characteristic function.
And if somebody happened to say that his farm was not properly cultivated, his answer was 'Of course my real job is to be a professor.'
Lindeberg's work was unknown to Alan Turing, who proved the central limit theorem in his dissertation in 1935.