Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg

Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg (1876 to 1932) was a Finnish mathematician, born and died in Helsinki, best known for his work on the central limit theorem. He spent his career at the University of Helsinki. His early interests lay 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, reaching a result similar to one Lyapunov had obtained earlier without his knowing it, but by a different route based on a convolution argument. Two years later he used the same method to obtain a stronger result, the condition now called the Lindeberg condition. He also developed what is now known as Kendall tau and found the first two moments of its sampling distribution, and he applied line transect methods in forestry. He was well off and ran a farm, and was said to prefer being a reader to being a full professor.