Gerhard Derflinger

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Gerhard Derflinger (born October 11, 1936 ; † February 27, 2015 ) was an Austrian statistician and chemist.

Life

After graduating from the Bundesrealschule Wien 16 in 1954, he studied chemistry at the University of Vienna . He received his doctorate in 1964. During his doctoral studies, he was also employed at the computer center of the University of Vienna and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna . After completing his doctorate, he worked there full-time until 1965. With his work on data processing and mathematical statistics , he received his habilitation in 1968 at the University of Vienna. From 1965 to 1967 he was an assistant at the Organic Chemical Institute of the University of Vienna, then until 1968 at the Institute for Statistics.

In 1961 he carried out the first quantum mechanical calculations on the computer in Austria. In 1963 he determined the first 968 partial denominators of the regular continued fraction of pi for Gustav Lochs (University of Innsbruck), entered to 1000 decimal places. To do this, he had developed long number arithmetic on the Burroughs Datatron 205 computer . In 1963/64 he was a member and secretary of the working group led by Slawtscho Sagoroff for the preparation of the first input-output analysis of the Austrian economy. From 1964 to 1969 he advised Sandoz, Clinical Research Center Vienna, on the planning and statistical analysis of clinical trials. In 1967/68 he organized and programmed computer enrollment at the University of Vienna with Hans Lischka (whose dissertation in theoretical chemistry he was in charge of) and Günter Pfeiffer.

In 1968 he was appointed professor of statistics at the newly founded University of Social and Economic Sciences in Linz . In the same year he established the Technical and Natural Sciences Faculty (TNF) together with Adolf Adam and Hans Knapp . Until 1970 he held the office of vice dean of this faculty, and until 1971 he was also the head of the computer center of the university. He was also the first chairman of the computer science study commission when the University of Linz was the first Austrian university to introduce this degree in 1969. For the period 1970/1971 he was rector of the University of Linz, then until 1972 vice rector.

From 1969 to 1972 he was a construction officer for the TNF. He worked with the architects Helmut Eisendle and Jakob Sabernig on the planning of the chemical tower (later renamed the TNF tower). From 1968 to 1975 he also headed the statistics department of the Austrian Institute for Labor Market Policy at the University of Linz. The most important task was the creation of labor market forecasts for the Ministry of Social Affairs, including a short-term forecast with the target date August 1970. This was not only important for socio-political reasons, but also served the (ÖVP sole) government as an aid in deciding how many guest workers should also be brought to Austria so that the targeted economic growth of three percent annually can also be achieved. According to the sample plan developed by Derflinger's employees Wulf Böing and Ewald Kutzenberger, the heads of more than 4,000 companies were personally interviewed by officials from the employment offices about their additional labor requirements. The extrapolation was then carried out again in the statistics department.

In 1972 Derflinger was appointed professor of statistics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business . He stayed at the University of Linz until 1977 as a visiting professor for statistics. In addition, from 1969 to 1996 he was visiting professor for group theory in chemistry at the University of Vienna . At the end of the 1970s, together with the chemists Hildegard Keller, Christine Krieger, Elisabeth Langer and Harald Lehner from the University of Vienna, he refuted the theory of the chirality functions by Ruch et al., A theory in the field of optical activity that was enthusiastically received by experts had been.

With his work in the Biometric Journal in 1968 he made the maximum likelihood factor analysis computationally feasible on the computer; later he also achieved this for the alpha factor analysis by Kaiser and Caffrey. In 1985 he was a visiting researcher with Henry F. Kaiser at the University of California, Berkeley . Together with Kaiser he published in the field of mathematical psychology .

The Gaussian or normal distribution generator ACR developed by Wolfgang Hörmann and Derflinger in 1989/90 is implemented in the LHC experiment at CERN in Geneva. From 1986 to 1988 and 1992 to 1996 Derflinger was chairman of the department for humanities and formal sciences at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, which at the time was divided into four departments. In 2005 he retired .

Derflinger is widowed and has two sons.

Honors

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Computer science at the JKU Linz (ed.): 25 Years of Computer Science in Linz Four-Year Report 1990–1993
  2. ^ Franz Strehl (Ed.): Johannes Kepler University Linz , University Press Trauner, Linz
  3. ^ Standesamt Wien-Hietzing (Ed.): Death Book No. 4083/2011 , December 12, 2011
  4. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Derflinger, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian statistician
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 27, 2015