Leopold Schmetterer
Karl Leopold Schmetterer ( born November 8, 1919 in Vienna, † 23 August 2004 in Gols ) was an Austrian statisticians and probability theorists.
Life
Schmetterer attended the grammar school in Vienna and studied from 1938 to 1941 at the University of Vienna mathematics, physics and meteorology, in particular with Nikolaus Hofreiter and Edmund Hlawka. In 1941 he received his doctorate in Vienna with a number- theoretical work and was then conscripted to 1945 at the Henschel works in Berlin as a mathematician.
After the war he was an assistant in Vienna with Johann Radon, in which he dealt with Analysis and habilitated in 1949. He was a lecturer at the University of Vienna (and also the Vienna University of Technology ) and Associate Adjunct Professor in 1955. In 1956 he became Professor of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Hamburg. In 1961 he was the successor of radon full professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna, from 1971 as a professor of statistics.
In 1990, he retired. He worked as a visiting professor at many universities, including the U.S., France and Israel. He died in a traffic accident in a car at a railway crossing.
Importance
Schmetterer was substantially involved in the reconstruction of the statistics in Germany and Austria after the Second World War. Schmetterer, who had an analytical background, led a rigorous mathematical methods and made the development of statistics in other countries ( for example, by Jerzy Neyman and Karl Pearson ) in German speaking countries through a major textbook known. He worked among others with stochastic approximation ( speed of convergence processes). He was 1962 Co-founder and first editor of the Journal of Probability Theory and Related Fields.
Schmetterer was a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences ( corresponding member since 1970, full member since 1971, 1975-1983 General Secretary ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Saxon Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of the GDR and the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina.
Awards (selection)
Writings (selection )
- Introduction to Mathematical Statistics. Springer, Wien- New York 1956.