Georg von Mayr

Georg von Mayr (1841 to 1925) was a German statistician and economist, born in Würzburg, who directed the Bavarian Statistical Bureau and shaped the theory of official and social statistics. He was the son of the Würzburg mathematician Aloys Mayr. He studied at the University of Munich, took his doctorate there in 1865 under Friedrich Benedikt Wilhelm von Hermann with a dissertation on the statistics of beggars and vagrants in Bavaria, and habilitated in 1866. He became an extraordinary professor in 1868 and in 1869 succeeded Hermann as head of the Statistical Bureau, for which he founded a journal that carried many of his papers on population statistics. The star diagram was first used by Mayr in 1877. He was ennobled in 1879 and called to Strasbourg as an imperial under-secretary in the Alsatian ministry, resigned in 1887 and returned to Munich. His principal work is Statistik und Gesellschaftslehre, in three volumes on theoretical statistics, population statistics and moral and criminal statistics. He became rector of the University of Munich in 1913, signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in 1914 and died in Tutzing in 1925.