Alexander Alexandrovich Chuprov
Encyclopedia
Alexander Alexandrovich Chuprov (or Tschuprov) (Russian: Алекса́ндр Александро́вич Чупро́в) (Mosal'sk
, February 18, 1874 - Geneva
, April 19, 1926) Russian
statistician
who worked on mathematical statistics
, sample survey theory and demography
.
Chuprov was born in Mosal'sk but grew up and was educated in Moscow
where his father, Alexander Ivanovich (1842–1908), a distinguished economist and statistician, was a professor. Alexander Alexandrovich graduated from the physico-mathematical faculty of Moscow University in 1896 with a dissertation on "The theory of probability as the foundation of theoretical statistics." He spent the years 1897-1901 studying political economy
in Germany
, in Berlin
and Strasbourg
. His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Georg Friedrich Knapp
(1842–1926) Die Feldgemeinschaft, eine morphologische Untersuchung was published in 1902. The most important result of his stay in Germany was his friendship with the statistician Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
. On his return to Russia and, in order to get a teaching position, Chuprov completed master's examinations at the University of Moscow, concentrating on theoretical economics and the application of mathematical methods. He started teaching at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute and was in charge of the teaching of statistics
until 1917.
Chuprov used to go abroad regularly to work in foreign libraries. In June 1917 he went to Stockholm
to the Statistical Bureau. He was away from Russia when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred. He intended to return but first illness and then money problems prevented him. In January 1919 he became director of the statistical bureau of the Central Union in Stockholm and in charge of its publication Bulletin of World Economy. In the middle of 1920 he moved to Dresden
where in complete seclusion he wrote furiously. In 1925 he took up an appointment with the Russian College in Prague
. The following year he died.
. Chuprov's research was influenced by Bortkiewicz on the theoretical side and his father, A. I. Chuprov, on the empirical. Bortkiewicz was the leading exponent of the dispersion theory of Lexis
and Chuprov contributed to this research. (There is a brief account of the history of this theory in Heyde & Seneta (1977.)) A. I. Chuprov was the leader of a movement to get statistical information on social conditions in Russia. By 1910 his son A. A. Chuprov was writing about the use of random sampling in such investigations. His work paralleled that of Bowley
in England. Chuprov's first work on sampling was not mathematical but in the 1920s he developed the formula for optimal allocation in stratified sampling (to be rediscovered by Neyman
in 1934 and usually associated with him). Chuprov also did demographic research.
Chuprov tried to bring together the approaches of Bortkiewicz and Lexis, of the Russian mathematicians and of the English biometricians. He watched developments in Britain
and was sympathetic to the work of Karl Pearson
, much more so than A. A. Markov
with whom he corresponded on statistical matters. Both Chuprov and his student Oskar Anderson
published in Pearson’s journal Biometrika
. Chuprov was not above telling the English off, “English scientific tradition rejects the concept of ‘mathematical probability’ … and the method of mathematical expectation has naturally shared the fate of the concept … on which it rests.” For a brief period Chuprov was known in Britain. In John Maynard Keynes
' Treatise on Probability (1921) he is put with Markov
and Chebyshev
as the three great Russian names in the theory of statistics. However, with the rise of Fisherian
statistics, Chuprov was forgotten. In Scandinavia he had a more lasting influence, principally through the papers he published in the Skandinavisk Aktuarietidskrift.
(The same website now [2007] also offers a downloadable version, in Russian, of the recently discovered Bortkiewicz-Chuprov correspondence 1895-1926.)
The MacTutor site does not have an entry for Chuprov but it has entries for Chuprov's 'masters', Bortkiewicz and Lexis, and his student, Oskar Anderson.
There is a photograph of Chuprov at
The photograph also appears on the Russian Academy of Sciences website, as does one of his father A. I. Chuprov.
Mosalsk
Mosalsk is a town and the administrative center of Mosalsky District of Kaluga Oblast, Russia, located west of Kaluga. Population: First attested in 1231 , it became the center of one of the Upper Principalities in the 14th century...
, February 18, 1874 - Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
, April 19, 1926) Russian
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....
statistician
Statistician
A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...
who worked on mathematical statistics
Mathematical statistics
Mathematical statistics is the study of statistics from a mathematical standpoint, using probability theory as well as other branches of mathematics such as linear algebra and analysis...
, sample survey theory and demography
Demography
Demography is the statistical study of human population. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic human population, that is, one that changes over time or space...
.
Chuprov was born in Mosal'sk but grew up and was educated in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
where his father, Alexander Ivanovich (1842–1908), a distinguished economist and statistician, was a professor. Alexander Alexandrovich graduated from the physico-mathematical faculty of Moscow University in 1896 with a dissertation on "The theory of probability as the foundation of theoretical statistics." He spent the years 1897-1901 studying political economy
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
and Strasbourg
Strasbourg
Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and is the official seat of the European Parliament. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin département. The city and the region of Alsace are historically German-speaking,...
. His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Georg Friedrich Knapp
Georg Friedrich Knapp
Georg Friedrich Knapp was a German economist and founder of the chartalist school of monetary theory, which takes the statist stance on money, claiming that it must have no intrinsic value and strictly be used as governmentally-issued token i.e...
(1842–1926) Die Feldgemeinschaft, eine morphologische Untersuchung was published in 1902. The most important result of his stay in Germany was his friendship with the statistician Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz , August 7, 1868 – July 15, 1931) was a Russian economist and statistician of Polish descent, who lived most of his professional life in Germany, where he taught at Strassburg University and Berlin University...
. On his return to Russia and, in order to get a teaching position, Chuprov completed master's examinations at the University of Moscow, concentrating on theoretical economics and the application of mathematical methods. He started teaching at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute and was in charge of the teaching of statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
until 1917.
Chuprov used to go abroad regularly to work in foreign libraries. In June 1917 he went to Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
to the Statistical Bureau. He was away from Russia when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred. He intended to return but first illness and then money problems prevented him. In January 1919 he became director of the statistical bureau of the Central Union in Stockholm and in charge of its publication Bulletin of World Economy. In the middle of 1920 he moved to Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
where in complete seclusion he wrote furiously. In 1925 he took up an appointment with the Russian College in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
. The following year he died.
Work and influence
Chuprov was influential both as a teacher and as a writer. The curriculum he designed for the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute was modern and his book on the theory of statistics was influential. He had some good students, the best known was Oskar AndersonOskar Anderson
Oskar Johann Viktor Anderson was a German-Russian mathematician. He was most famously known for his work on mathematical statistics.- Life :...
. Chuprov's research was influenced by Bortkiewicz on the theoretical side and his father, A. I. Chuprov, on the empirical. Bortkiewicz was the leading exponent of the dispersion theory of Lexis
Wilhelm Lexis
Wilhelm Lexis was an eminent German statistician, economist, and social scientist and a founder of the interdisciplinary study of insurance....
and Chuprov contributed to this research. (There is a brief account of the history of this theory in Heyde & Seneta (1977.)) A. I. Chuprov was the leader of a movement to get statistical information on social conditions in Russia. By 1910 his son A. A. Chuprov was writing about the use of random sampling in such investigations. His work paralleled that of Bowley
Arthur Lyon Bowley
Sir Arthur Lyon Bowley was an English statistician and economist who worked on economic statistics and pioneered the use of sampling techniques in social surveys....
in England. Chuprov's first work on sampling was not mathematical but in the 1920s he developed the formula for optimal allocation in stratified sampling (to be rediscovered by Neyman
Jerzy Neyman
Jerzy Neyman , born Jerzy Spława-Neyman, was a Polish American mathematician and statistician who spent most of his professional career at the University of California, Berkeley.-Life and career:...
in 1934 and usually associated with him). Chuprov also did demographic research.
Chuprov tried to bring together the approaches of Bortkiewicz and Lexis, of the Russian mathematicians and of the English biometricians. He watched developments in Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
and was sympathetic to the work of Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson FRS was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the disciplineof mathematical statistics....
, much more so than A. A. Markov
Andrey Markov
Andrey Andreyevich Markov was a Russian mathematician. He is best known for his work on theory of stochastic processes...
with whom he corresponded on statistical matters. Both Chuprov and his student Oskar Anderson
Oskar Anderson
Oskar Johann Viktor Anderson was a German-Russian mathematician. He was most famously known for his work on mathematical statistics.- Life :...
published in Pearson’s journal Biometrika
Biometrika
- External links :* . The Internet Archive. 2011....
. Chuprov was not above telling the English off, “English scientific tradition rejects the concept of ‘mathematical probability’ … and the method of mathematical expectation has naturally shared the fate of the concept … on which it rests.” For a brief period Chuprov was known in Britain. In John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA , was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments...
' Treatise on Probability (1921) he is put with Markov
Andrey Markov
Andrey Andreyevich Markov was a Russian mathematician. He is best known for his work on theory of stochastic processes...
and Chebyshev
Pafnuty Chebyshev
Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev was a Russian mathematician. His name can be alternatively transliterated as Chebychev, Chebysheff, Chebyshov, Tschebyshev, Tchebycheff, or Tschebyscheff .-Early years:One of nine children, Chebyshev was born in the village of Okatovo in the district of Borovsk,...
as the three great Russian names in the theory of statistics. However, with the rise of Fisherian
Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation...
statistics, Chuprov was forgotten. In Scandinavia he had a more lasting influence, principally through the papers he published in the Skandinavisk Aktuarietidskrift.
Publications
Until recently (see Sheynin link below) only a few of Chuprov's many works were available in English- Al. A. Tchouproff (1918) On the Mathematical Expectation of the Moments of Frequency Distributions, Biometrika, 12, No. 1/2, pp. 140-169.
- A. A. Chuprov (1924) On the Mathematical Expectation of the Moments of Frequency Distributions in the Case of Correlated Obsevations, Metron, 2, 461-493, 646-683.
- A. A. Tschuprow Principles of the Mathematical Theory of Correlation; translated by M. Kantorowitsch. W. Hodge & Co. 1939
- The Correspondence between A.A. Markov and A.A. Chuprov on the Theory of Probability and Mathematical Statistics, ed. Kh.O. Ondar (1981, Springer)
Obituaries
- L. I. (Leon IsserlisLeon IsserlisLeon Isserlis was a Russian-born British statistician known for his work on the exact distribution of sample moments, including Isserlis’ theorem...
) (1926) Alexander Alexandrovitch Tschuprow, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. 89, No. 3 (May, 1926), pp. 619-622.
- J. M. K. (John Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA , was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments...
) (1926) Obituary: Professor A. A. Tschuprow, Economic Journal, Vol. 36, No. 143 (Sep., 1926), pp. 517-518.
Discussion
- E. Seneta (2001) Aleksander Aleksandrovich Chuprov, Statisticians of the Centuries (ed. C. C. Heyde and E. Seneta) pp. 303-307. New York: Springer.
- E. Seneta "Chuprov, Alexander Alexandrovich," pp. 185–7 in Leading Personalities in Statistical Sciences from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, (ed. N. L. Johnson and S. Kotz) 1997. New York: Wiley. Originally published in Encyclopedia of Statistical Science.
- O Sheynin, Aleksandr A Chuprov : life, work, correspondence. The making of mathematical statistics (Göttingen, 1996).
- E. Seneta (1985) A Sketch of the History of Survey Sampling in Russia, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 148, 118-125.
- C. C. Heyde & E. Seneta (1977) I. J. Bienaymé: Statistical Theory Anticipated, New York: Springer.
External links
The richest source of information about Chuprov is Oscar Sheynin's article:(The same website now [2007] also offers a downloadable version, in Russian, of the recently discovered Bortkiewicz-Chuprov correspondence 1895-1926.)
The MacTutor site does not have an entry for Chuprov but it has entries for Chuprov's 'masters', Bortkiewicz and Lexis, and his student, Oskar Anderson.
There is a photograph of Chuprov at
The photograph also appears on the Russian Academy of Sciences website, as does one of his father A. I. Chuprov.