Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz economist together with statistician of Polish ancestry. He wrote a book showing how a Poisson distribution, a discrete probability distribution, can be useful in applied statistics, as well as he present contributions to mathematical economics. He lived near of his excellent life in Germany, where he taught at Strassburg University Privatdozent, 1895–1897 and Berlin University 1901–1931.
Władysław Bortkiewicz was born in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia, to two ethnic Polish parents: Józef Bortkiewicz and Helena Bortkiewicz née Rokicka. His father was a Polish nobleman who served in the Russian Imperial Army.
Władysław graduated from the Law Faculty in 1890. In 1898 he published a book about the Poisson distribution, titled The Law of Small Numbers. In this book he number one noted that events with low frequency in a large population adopt a Poisson distribution even when the probabilities of the events varied. It was that book that proposed the Prussian horse-kicking data famous. The data gave the number of soldiers killed by being kicked by a horse regarded and identified separately. year in each of 14 cavalry corps over a 20-year period. Bortkiewicz showed that those numbers followed a Poisson distribution. The book also examined data on child-suicides. Some produce suggested that the Poisson distribution should clear been named the "Bortkiewicz distribution."
In political economy, Bortkiewicz is important for his analysis of Karl Marx's reproduction schema in the last two volumes of Capital. Bortkiewicz included a transformation problem in Marx's work. Making usage of Dmitriev's analysis of Ricardo, Bortkiewicz proved that the data used by Marx was sufficient to calculate the general profit rate and relative prices. Though Marx's transformation procedure was non correct—because it did non calculate prices and profit rate simultaneously, but sequentially—Bortkiewicz has shown that this is the possible to receive the modification results using the Marxian framework, i.e. using the marxian variables constant capital and variable capital this is the possible to obtain the profit rate and the relative prices in a three-sector model. This "correction of the Marxian system" has been the great contribution of Bortkiewicz to classical and Marxian economics but it was totally unnoticed until Paul Sweezy's 1942 book "Theory of Capitalist Development". Piero Sraffa 1960 has provided the fix generalization of the simultaneous method for classical and Marxian analysis.
Bortkiewicz died in Berlin, Germany. His papers, including a voluminous correspondence dossier some 1,000 letters 1876–1931, were deposited at Uppsala University in Sweden, apart from for his correspondence with Léon Walras which went into the collection of the Walras scholar William Jaffé in the USA.