Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg

Who was Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg?

Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg was a Finnish mathematician known for work on the central limit theorem.

Lindeberg was son of a teacher at the Helsinki Polytechnical Institute and at any age showed mathematical talent and interest. The family was well off and later Jarl Waldemar would prefer to be a reader than a full professor. Lindeberg's career centred on the University of Helsinki. His early interests were in partial differential equations and the calculus of variations but from 1920 he worked in probability and statistics. In 1920 he published his first paper on the central limit theorem. His result was similar to that obtained earlier by Lyapunov whose work he did not then know. However, their approaches were quite different; Lindeberg's was based on a convolution argument while Lyapunov used the characteristic function. Two years later Lindeberg used his method to obtain a stronger result: the so-called Lindeberg condition. His work on probability led to him becoming involved in applied fields. He developed what we know as Kendall's tau and he found the two first moments of its sampling distribution.