Oskar Anderson (nonfiction)

Oskar Johann Viktor Anderson (circa 1930).

Oskar Johann Viktor Anderson (Belarusian: Оскар Віктар Андэрсан; 2 August 1887, Minsk, Russian Empire – 12 February 1960, Munich, Germany) was a Russian-born German mathematician of Baltic German descent. He is most famously known for his work on mathematical statistics and econometrics.

Anderson was born from a Baltic German family in Minsk (now in Belarus), but soon moved to Kazan (Russia). His father, Nikolai Anderson, was professor in Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Kazan. His older brothers were the folklorist Walter Anderson and the astrophysicist Wilhelm Anderson. Oskar Anderson graduated from Kazan Gymnasium with a gold medal in 1906.

After studying mathematics for one year at the University of Kazan, he moved to St. Petersburg to study economics at the Polytechnic Institute. From 1907 to 1915, he was Aleksandr Chuprov's assistant. In 1912 he started lecturing at a commercial school in St. Petersburg. In 1918 he took on a professorship in Kiev but he was forced to flee Russia in 1920 due to the Russian Revolution, first taking a post in Budapest (Hungary) before becoming a professor at the University of Economics at Varna (Bulgaria) in 1924.

Anderson was one of the charter members of the Econometric Society, whose members also elected him to be a fellow of the society in 1933.

In 1935 he was appointed director of the Statistical Institute for Economic Research at the University of Sofia and in 1942 he took up a full professorship of statistics at the University of Kiel, where he was joined by his brother Walter Anderson after the end of the second world war. In 1947 he took a position at the University of Munich, teaching there until 1956, when he retired.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Alexander Alexandrovich Chuprov (nonfiction)
• Mathematician (nonfiction)
• Wilhelm Anderson (nonfiction)

External links:

• Oskar Anderson @ Wikipedia