Obukhov, Vladimir Mikhailovich

Obukhov, Vladimir Mikhailovich 

Born July 20, 1873, in Novocherkassk; died Jan. 5, 1945, in Moscow. Soviet statistician. Doctor of economic sciences (1936).

Obukhov graduated from Moscow University in 1896 and became a member of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg that same year. He was arrested and exiled several times. A delegate to the Third Congress of the RSDLP, he took an active part in the Revolution of 1905–07.

Obukhov began his work as a professional statistician in 1911. From 1926 to 1933 he was a member of the Central Board of Statistics of the USSR and director of the Institute of Experimental Statistics and Statistical Methods. From 1933 to 1938 he headed a group that conducted an in-depth study of harvest yields for the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR. Obukhov skillfully applied statistical methods in his studies of the conditions that determine harvest yields. He was the first to study the influence of meteorological factors on short-term variation in harvest yields for individual zones. He was also the first to use the multiple correlation method in studying harvest yields.

WORKS

K voprosu o nakhozhdenii uravneniia regressii, udovletvoriaiushchego empiricheskomu statistkheskomu riadu. Moscow, 1923.
“Dvizhenie urozhaev v Evropeiskoi Rossii za period 1833–1915 gody.” In the collection Vliianie neurozhaev na narodnoe khoziaistvo Rossii, part 1. Moscow, 1927.
Urozhainost’ i meteorologicheskie factory: statisticheskie issledovaniia. Moscow, 1949.

V. V. ORESHKIN