Marcello Boldrini

Vocation

Italian statistician who taught courses in statistics, biometry, and demography at Bocconi University of Milan, and then at the University of Rome as Emeritus Professor. He was also a member of several academies and institutes in Italy and abroad, serving for several years as president of the International Statistical Institute. His scientific research was on both methodological and applied statistics, particularly on demography, anthropometry, and economics. As a statistician, he has been particularly interested to the foundations of the method, and he proposed a view of statistics as an empirical history of all the positive sciences. To deepen these researches he founded a statistical Laboratory at the Catholic University of Milan. The results are widely discussed in the volumes, Statistica: Teoria e metodi (first edition, 1942), and Teoria della Statistica (1963), that have been studied by thousands of students. For Boldrini, Statistics is a formal science like mathematics and logic, but it is different from them as a scientific inquiry method in the inductive and deductive phases of research. He died on 5 March 1969 in Milan, aged 79. Link to Wikipedia biography