Herman Wold

In 1960 Wold became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Prize Committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel from 1968 to 1980.

In 1945 to 1965, Wold proposed and elaborated on his "recursive causal chain" model, which was more appropriate for many applications, according to Wold: For such "recursive causal chain" models, the least squares method was computationally efficient and enjoyed superior theoretical properties, which it lacked for general time-series models. Wold's writings on causality and recursive-chain models have been recognized as scientific inventions by recent work on causality and graphical models in statistics, especially by Judea Pearl and Nanny Wermuth.

In 1943 and 1944, Trygve Haavelmo put forward his ideas on the simultaneous equations model, arguing that systems of simultaneous equations should be central in econometric research. Wold noted some limitation of the maximum-likelihood approach favoured by Haavelmo and the Cowles Commission; Wold cautioned that the literature contained some exaggerated claims for the superiority of maximum-likelihood estimation.

The story of Wold's academic appointments is briefly told. In 1942 he became professor of statistics at Uppsala University and he stayed there until 1970. He then moved to Gothenburg, retiring from there in 1975.

In 1938 a government committee appointed Wold to do an econometric study of consumer demand in Sweden. The results were published in 1940. In parallel, he worked on the theory of demand. His book Demand Analysis (1952) brought together his work on the theory of demand, the theory of stochastic processes, the theory of regression and his work on Swedish data.

After graduating in 1930 Wold worked for an insurance company; he also did work on mortality data with Cramér and later designed a tariff for the insurance companies. He started work on a PhD on stochastic processes with Cramér as supervisor. Away from the thesis Wold and Cramér did some joint work, their best known result being the Cramér–Wold theorem (1936).

In 1927 Wold enrolled at the University of Stockholm to study mathematics. It was an opportune time, for Harald Cramér had been appointed Professor of Actuarial Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. Wold would later write, "To belong to Cramér's first group of students was good luck, an advantage that simply cannot be exaggerated."

Herman Wold was born in Skien, Southern Norway. He was the youngest in a family of six brothers and sisters. In 1912 the family moved to Sweden and became Swedish citizens. Herman's father had a small fur and hide business.

Herman Ole Andreas Wold (25 December 1908 – 16 February 1992) was a Norwegian-born econometrician and statistician who had a long career in Sweden. Wold was known for his work in mathematical economics, in time series analysis, and in econometric statistics.