Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg (1876 – 1932) was reader of mathematics in Helsinki. His early interests were in partial differential equations and the calculus of variations but from 1920 he worked in probability and statistics. In 1920 he published his first paper on the central limit theorem. His result was similar to that obtained earlier by Lyapunov whose work he did not then know. However, their approaches were quite different; Lindeberg's was based on a convolution argument while Lyapunov used the characteristic function. Two years later Lindeberg used his method to obtain a stronger result: the so-called Lindeberg condition. His work on probability led to him becoming involved in applied fields. He developed what we know as Kendall's tau and he found the two first moments of its sampling distribution. Lindeberg used line transect methods in forestry, and when in 1926 determining the necessary number of transects to obtain a sufficiently precise confidence interval, he seems to have rediscovered Student's t-distribution.
Writing available on the web
Biography
- Elfving, G. (2001) Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg, Statisticians of the Centuries (ed. C. C. Heyde and E. Seneta) pp. 318-321. New York: Springer.
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