Leo Törnqvist

Leo Waldemar Törnqvist (14 February 1911 – 18 April 1983) was one of the first professors of statistics in Finland, and the first to achieve international recognition. He taught at the University of Helsinki from 1943 to 1974, and developed techniques that are used in official price and productivity statistics.

Life, education, and career Törnqvist was born on 14 February 1911 in Jeppo, a Swedish-speaking village in Finland. He studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, where his interests shifted to economics and statistics under the influence of Swedish economist Arthur Montgomery. He finished his studies in Turku in 1933 and continued with graduate work in mathematics at Stockholm University, earning a doctorate in 1937 under the supervision of Harald Cramér and Gunnar Myrdal. These Törnqvist indexes are used in official price and productivity statistics in many countries. In a 1949 work, he also made "the first serious attempt to describe population forecasting from a stochastic point of view", providing "seminal works" in Bayesian inference in demography.

As a professor at the University of Helsinki, his students included economist Timo Teräsvirta. His student Vieno Rajaoja was the first Finnish woman to earn a doctorate in statistics, in 1958. These were Linus's first programming experiences. Ten years later, Torvalds began to write the Linux kernel.

Leo Törnqvist's brother was diplomat Erik Törnqvist.