Korösy, József
Kőrösy, József
József Kőrösy (1844–1906) was a pioneer Hungarian statistician. He was born in Pest, where his father was a merchant. The family moved to the country to take up farming, but Kőrösy’s father died when he was six, and he returned to Pest for his education. Financial difficulties forced him to take a job immediately upon graduating from secondary school. After working first as an insurance clerk, he became a journalist and wrote a column on economics. Although he never regularly attended a university and was almost entirely self-taught, he nevertheless acquired both proficiency in languages and advanced knowledge in his professional specialty.
The articles that Kőrösy wrote on economics revealed his excellent sense for statistics and attracted attention. Therefore, in 1869 when a municipal statistical office was first set up in Pest, Kőrösy was appointed director. Only two years had passed since Kàroly Keleti had set up the Hungarian national statistical service. Prior to that time there had been no such service provided for Hungary; the Austrian government statistical service in Vienna had been responsible for all data relating to Hungary and had furthermore treated most of these data as confidential. Consequently there had been little opportunity for the development of statistical thought in Hungary.
Kőrösy was a research scholar as well as an official statistician—a rare combination—and he turned the Budapest statistical office into a model research institution. (Budapest was formed in 1873, and Kőrösy’s office at that time became the statistical office for the new city.) Data were collected covering nearly every aspect of Budapest life. Publications by the office included both methodological experiments and pragmatic analyses, usually written by Kőrösy. He edited the statistical publications of Budapest and was in charge of publishing the first comparative statistics relating to big cities (for vital statistics, see 1874; for finances, see 1877; and so forth).
From 1883 on, Kőrösy was also a reader at the University of Budapest; he lectured there in the field of demography. He was a member of many statistical organizations and of other scientific societies and the recipient of numerous honors and awards, both at home and abroad.
Kőrösy contributed voluminously to the statistical and demographic literature of his age, and his contributions covered a wide range of subjects. His studies of Budapest included detailed analyses both of the city’s population census and of mortality. He also used Budapest data to study patterns of contagious diseases, pauperism, public education, construction, taxation, and—with newly developed indicators—corporation profits.
His most outstanding papers from the methodo-logical point of view were those in which he developed the first “natality” (or fertility) tables. These tables and other investigations showed the relationship between the parents’ ages and the viability of the newborn infant, as well as the effect of the ages of spouses and the length of their marriage on fertility and family size.
Kőrösy also made important contributions to the problem of obtaining reliable mortality tables. Al-though his “individual method” of constructing generation mortality tables was not practicable, his proposals make him a precursor of modern cohort analysis. The individual method is an extremely laborious one: Kőrösy planned to follow the life histories of a certain number of persons by using a separate chart for each individual, a sort of perpetual register from birth to death; the charts would then be used to construct mortality tables. In this way precise and valuable data could be obtained, but the method was far too costly to be the final solution to the problem of compiling mortality rates, as Kőrösy believed it was (Saile 1927, pp. 237—238). Other pioneer research by Kőrösy dealt with the hereditary character of certain illnesses and with the effects of weather, housing conditions, educational level, and income level on morbidity and mortality.
Kőrösy tried many methodological innovations, most of which were successful. For example, his ingenious coefficients of relative intensity of morbidity or mortality enabled him to point out connections between phenomena when the size and distribution of the basic population are unknown. And although he was working at a time when the use of mathematics in statistics was not yet commonplace, the indexes he introduced for measuring association are very similar to those developed later by Pearson and Yule (see Jordan 1927, p. 337; Goodman & Kruskal 1959). He also had a great deal to do with introducing standardized descriptions of the causes of death—here he worked with Bertillon—and was active in attempts to standardize population censuses internationally. Along with Ogle in Britain and Koch in Germany, Kőrösy introduced the standardized death rate, which mitigates the problem of comparing over-all death rates in populations of diverse age distributions (Kőrösy 1892–1893; Annual Summary .. . 1883; Hamburg, Statistisches Landesamt 1883).
The statistics collected by Kőrösy’s office did much to lower the death rate in Budapest, in part by making clear the need for improved health standards. Battling against false statistics and erroneous methods, he fought for the use of smallpox vaccine (see Westergaard 1932, pp. 253–254).
In doctrine he stood close to Wilhelm Lexis, although he was ahead of Lexis in his knowledge of the laws of demography. Although Kőrösy did not write textbooks on either statistics or demography, his collaborators and students, most notably Gusztav Thirring, built on the extensive and sound foundations he laid.
Lajos Thirring
[Forthe historical context of Kőrösy’s work, seeSociology,article on THE EARLY HISTORY OF SOCIAL RE-SEARCH; Vital statistics; and the biography of Lexis; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, seeStatistics, descriptive,article on ASSOCIATION;and the biographies of Pearsonand YULE.]
WORKS BY KŐRÖSY
1871 Pest szabad királyi város az 1870, évben: A nápszémIálás és népleirás eredménye. Budapest: Ráth.→ Also published in 1872 in German by the same publisher.
1874 Welche Unterlagen hat die Statistik zu beschaffen um richtige Mortalitäts-tabellen zu gewinnen? Berlin:Engel.→ Reprinted in section 1 of International Statistical Congress, Ninth, Budapest, 1876, Programme.
1877 Statistique Internationale des grandes villes. Deuxieme Section: Finances. Budapest: Rath; Paris: Guillaumin.
1881 Projet d’un recensement du monde. Paris: Guillaumin.
1885 On the Unification of Census Record Tables.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A Jubilee Volume: 159–170.
(1887) 1889 Kritik der Vaccinations-statistik und neue Beiträge zur Frage des Impfschutzes. Berlin: Putt-kammer & Mühlbrecht.
1892a Mortalitäts-coëfficient und Mortalitäts-index. Institut international de statistique, Bulletin 6, no. 2: SOSSSI.
1892b Wissenschaftliche Stellung und Grenzen der Demologie. Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv 2:397–418.
1892–1893 Einfluss des Alters der Eltern auf die Vitalitat ihrer Kinder. Volume 10, pages 262–263 in International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, London, 1891, Transactions. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
1894 Über den Zusammenhang zwischen Armuth und infectiösen Krankheiten und liber die Methode der Intensitätsrechnung. Zeitschrift für Hygiene ünd Infectionskranhheiten 18:505–528. 1896 An Estimate of the Degrees of Legitimate Natality as Derived From a Table of Natality Compiled by the Author From His Observations Made at Budapest. Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions Series B 186:781–875.
1900 La statistique des résultats financiered des societes anonymes. Paris: Dupont.
1906 Über die Statistik der Ergiebigkeit der Ehen. Institut International de Statistique, Bulletin 15, no. 2: 404–416.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Annual Summary of Births, Deaths, and Causes of Death in London and Other Large Cities. 1883 Great Britain, General Register Office, Weekly Return of Births and Deaths in London and in Twenty-two Other Large Towns of the United Kingdom 54:i-lv.
Goodman, Leo A.; and Kruskal, William H. 1959 Measures of Association for Cross Classifications: II. Further Discussion and References. Journal of the American Statistical Association 54:123–163. Hamburg, Statistisches LandesamtStatistik des Hamburgischen Staats [1883], Heft 12.
J. A. B. 1907 Dr. Joseph Kőrösy.—M. G. Olanesco. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 70:332–333. *• The author of the article is J. A. Baines.
Jordan, Charles 1927 Les coefficients d’intensite relative de Kőrösy. Société Hongroise de Statistique, Revue 5:332–345.
Laky, DÉsirÉ 1939 Les représentants académiciens de la grande époque de la statistique hongroise. Société Hongroise de Statistique, Journal 17:365–378.
Saile, Tivadar A. 1927 Influence de Joseph de Kőrösy sur revolution de la statistique. Budapest: Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia.
Thirring, Gusztav 1907 Joseph de Kőrösy. Institut International de Statistique, Bulletin 16, no. 1:150–155.
Westergaard, Harald L. 1932 Contributions to the History of Statistics. London: King.