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'''Wilhelm WINKLER'''

b. 29 June 1884 - d. 3 September 1984

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'''Summary.''' As an organizer of statistics, and equally as a
university teacher and social researcher, Winkler
united theoretical and applied approaches to statistics. As a
leading statistician of ethnic minorities in the time between the World Wars, he
was also known as an advocate of the use of mathematical methods in the social 
sciences.

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'''Personal background''' 

Born in Prague, the fifth of eight 
children of a music teacher. Died in Vienna. He grew up in 
Prague, finished his studies at the ''Humanistisches Gymnasium'' (branch of 
secondary school) followed by the study of jurisprudence at the Karl-University 
in Prague, and joined the ''Statistisches Landes-Bureau des Königreiches 
Böhmen'' (Statistical Bureau of Bohemia) as the sole German speaking 
statistician. Severely wounded in World War I as a highly decorated reserve 
officer, he was appointed in 1916 to serve in Vienna, with distinguished 
economists of the Austrian School of Economics, as a member of the 
Austro-Hungarian Scientific Committee on the War Economy. In 1919 he published 
"Casualties of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy", a detailed statistical study of 
the war losses of each ethnic group of this multi-ethnic state. In that year he 
also participated in the peace negotiations as the statistical advisor to the 
Austrian peace delegation in St. Germain. In 1920 he became second in command of 
the newly formed "Osterreichisches Bundesamt für Statistik'' (Austrian 
Federal Statistics Office). In 1925 he was appointed director of its department 
of population statistics. At that time he also began teaching at the University. 
In 1921 he became ''Privat-Dozent'' (Assistant Professor) at the juridical 
faculty of the University of Vienna. In 1929 he was promoted to the rank of 
''Ausserordentlicher Professor für Statistik'' (equivalent to the status of 
an Associate Professor). W. Winkler then established the ''Institut für 
Statistik der Minderheitsvölker'' (Institute of
Statistics of Ethnic Minorities) at the University of Vienna 
where he pursued research on the demographic 
and socio-economic structure of the widely scattered German-speaking populations 
in the succession states of the Habsburg Monarchy. At this Institute he produced 
a stream of research publications about the demographic, social and economic 
situation of these ethnic minorities in Europe. His research had an impact on 
the political struggle to find solutions for these minorities in the new 
European successor states after World War I.

W. Winkler also established contacts with the international statistical 
community. As a result, his work, especially his studies in statistical theory 
for the social sciences, became recognized beyond the German speaking realm. 
After his election as a member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) 
in 1926 he participated actively in most bi-annual congresses of the ISI, 
establishing a reputation as a strong advocate and debater in favor of 
mathematical formulations in statistics instead of the wordy and vague 
formulations that then prevailed in continental Europe.

The ''Anschluss'' of Austria to the German Third Reich in 1938 interrupted 
his career. He was dismissed as director of the population census, expelled from 
the University and banned from giving the invited lecture that had been 
scheduled for the ISI congress in Prague. The reason was his public opposition 
to Nazism and his marriage to a spouse of Jewish descent. In 1945, after seven 
years of severe deprivations, difficulties and the persecution of his family by 
the Nazi party, W. Winkler was rehabilitated and rewarded with the upgrading of 
Statistics as a fully recognized academic discipline, required for the study of 
economics, management and jurisprudence. He was appointed as the first 
Ordinarius of Statistics - the Full 
Professor - at the University of Vienna since 1883, when the last Full Professor 
of this field retired. In 1950/51 he was honored by election as Dean 
of the ''Rechts- und Staatswissenschaftliche Facultät'' of that University. 
He continued his efforts for the further improvement and recognition of Statistics 
in Austria as an academic discipline in its own right, and as a recognized field of 
study. He had to overcome the stiff resistance by the faculty who opposed 
statistics on philosophic grounds, opposition that today is 
difficult to understand.

After his retirement at age 71, in 1955, he continued working vigorously for 
the progress and recognition of statistics. As Vice President of the 
International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) he organized 
the International Population Congress of 1959 in Vienna. In 1973 he was the 
driving force behind the ISI congress in Vienna. During his last years of life 
W. Winkler received numerous national and international honors in recognition of 
his role for the advancement of statistics. In 1952 he was elected Corresponding 
Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and in 1961 he became an Honorary Fellow 
of the Royal Statistical Society. In 1966 he was elected Honorary Member of ISI. 
He also 
received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Munich and Vienna. 

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'''Contributions to the development of statistics''' 

Wilhelm Winkler's 
early interest in the statistics of ethnic minorities stemmed from his personal 
experience of the tensions between Czech and German population groups in Prague. 
His career as a statistician emerged from a background of the multiethnic and 
multilingual structure of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In the 19th century the 
Austrian government, requiring extensive data on the different nationalities 
living in its empire, had to develop specific statistical methods to provide 
that information. W. Winkler began in that tradition. As a result of the 
disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918, the rise of the succession 
states, and the decline of the German hegemony, he developed new concepts for 
the research of ethnic minorities, beyond the concepts then in use. He also 
developed new demographic methods, among them the matching of population- and 
economic census data with data from other statistical sources. The most 
important result of these studies was his "Statistical Handbook of the German 
Populations" financed by the "Stiftung für Deutsche Volks- und 
Kulturbodenforschung'', the leading organization for German 
''Volksforschung'' in the Weimar Republic. The handbook used the new paradigm 
of statistics of ethnic minorities acknowledging the fact that ethnic groups 
often cross the borders of nations. W. Winkler can be regarded as one of the 
most influential demographers of his time, not only of Austria but also of the 
German speaking countries in general. Among German statisticians he was 
well-known for his efforts to introduce the mathematical methods, developed in 
the Anglo-American world, for socio-economic statistics, at a time when these 
new developments were hardly known on the European continent. It was his 
persistent, hard work of many years to convince his German colleagues of the 
need to open up academic statistics, as taught in the social sciences, to 
British and American developments in statistics. 

The main concern of demographers in the period between the two World Wars was 
the assumption of a precipitous decline of births threatening the quantity and 
quality of the population, presaging a loss of power and influence of Europe, 
and of the German speaking population in particular. W.Winkler proposed to 
reverse these demographic trends through specific tax politics to encourage the 
formation of new families by taxing unmarried adults. His fertility index, based 
on the results of the Austrian population census of 1934, became the basis on 
which population politics was widely discussed in the late 1930s, though never 
acted on.

After World War II W. Winkler turned from his earlier research on ethnic 
minorities to intensify his efforts to develop and disseminate new methods in 
statistics. By publishing his works on Econometrics (1952) and on Demometrics 
(1969) he rejoined the international statistical discussion, although the 
backwardness of German and Austrian statistical research relative to the 
statistical advances in the West made it increasingly more difficult to 
contribute successfully to international debates.

W. Winkler was the leading government statistician and organizer of 
statistics as a science during the years of the First Republic of Austria 
(1925-1938), and after World War II ( 1945-1955). In that time he occupied the 
most important positions in statistics at the University and in Government in 
Austria. W. Winkler was the founder of the Austrian statistical Journal, 
''Statistische Vierteljahresschrift'', whose first volume appeared in 1948, 
and the Co-Editor of ''Metrika''. He also founded the Austrian Statistical 
Society and created, praeter legem, a graduate program for statisticians from 
which the nucleus of the junior staff of Austrian and also some German 
statisticians emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. 

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====References====
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|1}}||valign="top"|  Adam, Adolf (Ed.) (1984). Festschrift für Wilhelm Winkler: anlässlich des 100.  Geburtstages am 29. Juni 1984 (Wien 1984) (= ''Schriftenreihe der Österreichischen  Statistischen Gesellschaft'', '''1'''). 
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|2}}||valign="top"|  Johnson, N.L. and Kotz, S. (Eds) (1987). Winkler, Wilhelm, in ''Leading  Personalities in Statistical Sciences'', Wiley, New York, pp. 322-324. 
|-
|valign="top"|{{Ref|3}}||valign="top"|  Schmetterer, Leopold (1984). Wilhelm Winkler at his 100th Anniversary,  ''International  Statistical Review'', '''52''', 227-228. 
|-
|valign="top"|{{Ref|4}}||valign="top"|  Schubnell, Hermann (1984). Wilhelm Winkler zur Vollendung seines hundertsten  Lebensjahres, in: ''Zeitschrift für Bevölkerungswissenschaft: Demographie'', '''10''', 109-114.
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<references />

Reprinted with permission from
Christopher Charles Heyde and Eugene William Seneta (Editors),
Statisticians of the Centuries, Springer-Verlag Inc., New York, USA.

[[Category:Statprob]]
[[Category:Biographical]]