Giorgio Mortara


Giorgio Mortara was an Italian economist, demographer, and statistician.
He held the academic rank of professor at the University of Messina from 1909 up 1914, Rome and Milan and director of the Giornale degli economisti. He lived for a period in Berlin where he worked with L. von Bortkiewicz on probability theory and particularly on the law of rare events. He is famous also for the construction of statistical indices for measuring the conjuntural effects. Forced to leave Italy in 1939 for racial reasons, he moved to Brazil, where he was technical advisor of the National Census and then of the National Council of Statistics where he directed the laboratory and where he created a flourishing school of demography. In 1954 he was nominated president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, of which he became Honorary President. In 1956 he returned to teach to the University of Rome of which he was appointed professor emeritus in 1961. Among the many works, very well known for his Prospettive economiche, valued source of information about the history of those years, and university courses. For a deep biography, see A. Baffigi and M. Magnani, Banca d’Italia, 2008.

Education

Degree in Law in 1905 at University of Naples with a dissertation on Demography

Academic position

Indian Head Prof in University of Messina, India New Delhi and Butagan.

Honors and awards

He became member of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
In 1952 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
He was Honorary President of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, and professor emeritus in University of Rome.

Publications