Giorgio Mortara (April 4, 1885 in Mantua, Italy β 1967, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) was an Italian economist, demographer, and statistician.
He held the academic rank of professor at the University of Messina from 1909 up 1914, Rome (1915β24) and Milan (1924β38) and director of the Giornale degli economisti (1910β38).
He lived for a period (1907β1908) in Berlin where he worked with L.
von Bortkiewicz on probability theory and particularly on the law of rare events.
He is famous also for the construction of statistical indices for measuring the conjuntural effects (economic barometers).
Forced to leave Italy in 1939 for racial reasons, he moved to Brazil, where he was technical advisor of the National Census (1939β48) and then of the National Council of Statistics where he directed the laboratory (1949β57) and where he created a flourishing school of demography.
In 1954 he was nominated president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, of which he became (1957) Honorary President.
In 1956 he returned to teach to the University of Rome of which he was appointed professor emeritus in 1961.
Among the many works, very well known for his Prospettive economiche (15 vols., 1921β37), valued source of information about the history of those years, and university courses.