Giorgio Mortara

Who was Giorgio Mortara?

Giorgio Mortara was an Italian economist, demographer, and statistician.

Giorgio was born in Mantua, Italy on April 4, 1885 and died in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1967. 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. He became member of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.