Harald Ludvig Westergaard
Harald Ludvig Westergaard (April 19, 1853 – December 13, 1936) was a Danish statistician and economist who is best known for his work in demography and the history of statistics.
Born and died in Copenhagen, he mostly lived there all his life, except for a study trip to England and Germany in 1877–78. He studied mathematics at the University of Copenhagen but became interested in economics. It’s believed he met the English economist William Stanley Jevons, and Jevons later mentioned Westergaard’s mathematical ideas in the preface to the second edition (1879) of the Theory of Political Economy. After this promising start, Westergaard did not produce further famous work in mathematical economics.
From 1880 to 1882 he worked for the Danish Insurance Office and developed an interest in demography. His international reputation grew with Die Lehre von der Mortalität und Morbilität (1881). The book earned him a gold medal from his university and helped him become a lecturer in 1883. In 1886, at age 33, he became a professor and he retired in 1924.
His later book, Contributions to the History of Statistics (1932), explored the history of vital and economic statistics up to the end of the 19th century. It discussed statistical theory but gave it a secondary role. In the introduction he wrote that, for a long time, probability theory had less influence on statistics than people had expected.
Westergaard was well known internationally. An obituary in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society of London described him as a senior statistician and praised his personal charm—simplicity, helpfulness, and friendliness—along with his intellectual achievements.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 00:04 (CET).