Alexander Alexandrovich Chuprov - Work and Influence

Work and Influence

Chuprov was influential both as a teacher and as a writer. The curriculum he designed for the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute was modern and his book on the theory of statistics was influential. He had some good students, the best known was Oskar Anderson. Chuprov's research was influenced by Bortkiewicz on the theoretical side and his father, A. I. Chuprov, on the empirical. Bortkiewicz was the leading exponent of the dispersion theory of Lexis and Chuprov contributed to this research. (There is a brief account of the history of this theory in Heyde & Seneta (1977.)) A. I. Chuprov was the leader of a movement to get statistical information on social conditions in Russia. By 1910 his son A. A. Chuprov was writing about the use of random sampling in such investigations. His work paralleled that of Bowley in England. Chuprov's first work on sampling was not mathematical but in the 1920s he developed the formula for optimal allocation in stratified sampling (to be rediscovered by Neyman in 1934 and usually associated with him). Chuprov also did demographic research.

Chuprov tried to bring together the approaches of Bortkiewicz and Lexis, of the Russian mathematicians and of the English biometricians. He watched developments in Britain and was sympathetic to the work of Karl Pearson, much more so than A. A. Markov with whom he corresponded on statistical matters. Both Chuprov and his student Oskar Anderson published in Pearson’s journal Biometrika. Chuprov was not above telling the English off, “English scientific tradition rejects the concept of ‘mathematical probability’ … and the method of mathematical expectation has naturally shared the fate of the concept … on which it rests.” For a brief period Chuprov was known in Britain. In John Maynard Keynes' Treatise on Probability (1921) he is put with Markov and Chebyshev as the three great Russian names in the theory of statistics. However, with the rise of Fisherian statistics, Chuprov was forgotten. In Scandinavia he had a more lasting influence, principally through the papers he published in the Skandinavisk Aktuarietidskrift.