Henry Schultz was a Polish-born American mathematical economist. He started a mathematical economics school at the University of Chicago.
Background
Henry was born on September 4, 1893 in the town of Szarkowszczyzna, county of Disna, Vilna province, in what was then Russian Poland (now Belarus), the oldest of three children of Sam and Rebecca (Kissin) Schultz. His father earned his livelihood by making picture frames; in 1907 he brought his family to the United States and settled in New York City, on Manhattan's lower East Side. The family was poor, and Henry worked evenings and during summer vacations through most of his years in the New York City.
Education
Schultz studied at New York City public schools and in the College of the City of New York, from which he received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1916. He then undertook graduate study in economics at Columbia University, where he was lastingly influenced by Professor Henry L. Moore's teaching and his applications of quantitative methods to research in economics.
After the war he was awarded an army scholarship and spent a substantial part of 1919 in study at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at the Galton Laboratory of Eugenic Research of the University of London under Professor Edwin Cannan in economics and Professors Arthur L. Bowley and Karl Pearson in statistics, among others.
Meanwhile he had completed the requirements for a Doctor of philosophy in economics, which was awarded by Columbia in 1925. His dissertation, "The Statistical Law of Demand as Illustrated by the Demand for Sugar" (Journal of Political Economy, October and December 1925), was the forerunner of the extensive researches in which he was to be engaged during the next twelve years.
Career
Schultz's work at Columbia was broken in 1917 by World War I, in which he served overseas with front-line American troops.
Returning to the United States and during the next six years he was engaged in studies for various federal agencies, including the Bureau of the Census, the Tariff Commission, and the Children's Bureau of the Department of Labor, which last he served as director of statistical research.
In 1926 Schultz was appointed a member of the department of economics at the University of Chicago, where he achieved international recognition as a teacher and scholar in mathematical economics and econometrics, subjects which at this time were taught in only a few universities in the United States. He prepared his lectures with the same meticulous care that he gave to his research, and perhaps for this reason they were inclined to be overly formal.
Shortly after he went to the University of Chicago Schultz undertook to enlarge upon the topic that had occupied him in his doctoral dissertation, statistical measurement of the "law of demand, " and to this project he largely devoted the next twelve years. His research was marked by painstaking attention to statistical accuracy and by his continuous effort to utilize the latest advances by scholars in statistics and economics, even at the cost of frequent reworking of his earlier findings in order to incorporate new or better data or quantitative methods. His massive work The Theory and Measurement of Demand (1938), published only a few weeks before his death. In a real sense this contains three books.
He died at the untimely age of forty-five when he, his wife, and his two daughters, Ruth and Jean, were killed in an automobile accident sixty miles east of San Diego, California.
Achievements
Henry Schultz was one of the founders of mathematical and statistical economics. Schultz was one of the founding members of the Econometric Society, an international organization of scholars in statistical economics, mathematical economics, and econometrics. As one of the early teachers of these subjects in the United States he helped to develop the widespread interest that has followed since the 1930's. His fundamental work - The Theory and Measurement of Demand, the result of his twelve years' work.
