Herman Wold

Herman Ole Andreas Wold (born December 25, 1908 in Skien , † February 16, 1992 ) was a Swedish statistician .

Herman Wold was born in Skien, southern Norway, the youngest of six siblings. The family moved to Sweden in 1912 and took Swedish citizenship. In 1927 he enrolled at Stockholm University and studied mathematics with Harald Cramér . Then, from 1930, he worked for an insurance company and began his doctoral thesis A Study in the Analysis of Stationary Time Series on stochastic processes under the supervision of Harald Cramér. The main result is the so-called Wold decomposition , in which a time series is broken down into a deterministic and a stochastic part.

In 1938 the Swedish government commissioned him to conduct a study of consumer demand in Sweden, which was published in 1940. At the same time he worked on demand theory , which led to his book Demand Analysis , published in 1952 , in which he combined demand theory with stochastic processes and regression theory. In 1942 he became professor of statistics at Uppsala University . In 1970 he moved to the University of Gothenburg , where he stayed until his retirement in 1975.

Herman Wold was a member and later president of the Econometric Society , an honorary member of the American Economic Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences . From 1968 to 1980 he worked for the Nobel Prize Committee for Economics .

In connection with his investigations of time series, Herman Wold achieved a functional analytical result on the decomposition of isometries, which is also called Wold decomposition or Wold-von Neumann decomposition.

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• Herman Wold: A Study in the Analysis of Stationary Time Series. Stockholm 1938 (Stockholm, University, dissertation, 1938).
• Herman Wold, Lars Juréen: Demand Analysis. A Study in Econometrics. Almqvist & Wiksell et al., Stockholm et al. 1952.
• Herman Wold: The Making of Statisticians. In: Joseph Gani (Ed.): The Making of Statisticians. Springer, New York NY 1982, ISBN 0-387-90684-3 , pp. 189-212, doi : 10.1007 / 978-1-4613-8171-6_14 .
• David F. Hendry , Mary S. Morgan: The ET Interview: Professor HOA Wold: 1908-1992. In: Econometric Theory. Vol. 10, No. 2, 1994, ISSN  0266-4666 , 413-433, online (PDF; 388.9 kB) .
• Herman Wold in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)

Web links

• Newspaper article about Herman Wold in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .