Leo Törnqvist

Leo Waldemar Törnqvist (1911–1983) was one of the first professors of statistics in Finland. He taught at the University of Helsinki from 1950 to 1974, and developed techniques that are used in official price and productivity statistics.

Tornqvist developed an approach to creating weighted price indexes across discrete time periods using weighted averages of growth rates in prices where the weights were quantity averages across the two periods. These Törnqvist indexes are used in official price and productivity statistics in many countries.

Törnqvist bought a Commodore VIC-20 about 1981 and asked his daughter Anna's son, Linus Torvalds, to help him program it. Törnqvist wrote out BASIC language programs, and grandson Linus, aged about eleven, typed them in. "He wanted me to share in the experience [and] get me interested in math," wrote Torvalds later. These were Linus's first programming experiences. Ten years later, Torvalds began to write the Linux kernel.

The Finnish Statistical Society gives a Leo Törnqvist Award for an outstanding master's degree thesis in statistics completed in the last two years.

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