The ET Interview: Professor H. O. A. Wold: 1908-1992 The ET Interview: Professor H. O. A. Wold: 1908-1992

David F. Hendry, Mary S. Morgan, H. O. A. Wold
Econometric Theory, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1994), pp. 419-433

Sadly, Herman Wold died on February 16, 1992, before agreeing to the final version of this interview. We are indebted to his son, Professor Svante Wold, for his kind permission to publish. We hope that this record of our discussions with Herman Wold, who, together with his two great Norwe- gian compatriots Ragnar Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo, helped lay the sta- tistical foundations of modern econometrics, will contribute to his memory. From our personal perspective, Herman Wold was an enthusiastic suppor- ter of our early incursions into the history of econometrics (see The History of Econometric Ideas by Mary Morgan, 1990), and we know that there are many like us who will greatly miss his stimulating contributions. Herman Wold was born on Christmas day, 1908, at Skien, Norway. His family moved to a small town outside Stockholm in 1912, and he lived in Sweden for the remainder of his life. He enrolled at Stockholm University in 1927 to study physics, mathematics, and economics but switched to study- ing statistics with Harald Cramer. After his undergraduate degree, he stud- ied the theory of risk with Cramer, then worked for an insurance company for a period, returning to Stockholm University in 1936. His doctoral the- sis of 1938, A Study in the Analysis of Stationary Time Series, embodies the famous Wold Decomposition theorem. In 1942, he moved to the Chair of Statistics in Uppsala and held that post until 1970, when he went to Goteborg for five years, finally becoming Professor Emeritus at Uppsala in 1975. He became a Fellow and later President of the Econometric Society; was Vice-President of the International Statistical Institute; a Foreign Honor- ary Member of both the American Economic Association and the Ameri- can Academy of Arts and Sciences; an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society; a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, serving on the Nobel Prize Committee in Economics from 1968 until 1980; and was the recipient of several honorary doctorates. In retirement, he was Professeur Invite at the University of Geneva until 1980.