7th september: 'Remembrance of a Master' - Palazzo del Bo' - Archivio Antico - Padova

8th september: 'Statistics for juridical, forensic and educational studies' - Department of Statistical Sciences, via C. Battisti 241 - Padova

Corrado Gini was a prominent statistician of the first half of the nineteenth century (see biography). Because of his scientific creativity and his organisational capacity, he can be considered one of the fathers of Italian statistics. Fifty years after his death, the University of Padua, where from 1913 to 1925 he was a full professor of statistics affiliated with the Law Faculty, aims to honour his activities by organising a series of events starting on 7 September 2015.
The events will consist of a ceremony of remembrance during which the leading role of Gini as a scholar, a professor and a culture-promoting agent (7 September) will be recalled and of a scientific conference dealing with research topics to which Gini contributed considerably through his seminal works (8 September).
On the evening of 7 September a social dinner will be organised for the participants of the conference and for alumni of the former Institute of Statistics founded by Gini about a century ago. Descendants of Gini's family will attend the dinner. Moreover, a contest with two prizes has been announced for the best papers on applied statistics submitted by young scholars for publication to any of the official journals of the conference.
Another activity to honour the Master will be a multimedia exhibit to represent "Gini and Statistics in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century". The exhibit aims at situating Gini in the emerging age of statistics as a scientific discipline, both in Italy and abroad.
The events in Padua will be a prelude to a conference organised in Treviso by the Italian Statistical Society with the title "Statistics and Demography: Gini's Legacy" from 9 to 11 September, and to a statistics festival that will also be held in Treviso from 12 to 13 September.

Corrado Gini was born in Motta di Livenza, Treviso, in 1884. He graduated from Bologna University in Law in 1905 with a thesis on the ratio between genders at birth. He used a quantitative approach, which was the start of his passion for statistics, at that time a subject for the enlightened few.
He left his mark wherever he went:
- At the University of Cagliari he started his activities in 1909 as a full professor and held a Chair in Statistics.
- At the University of Padua he founded the Institute of Statistics at the Law Faculty in 1913 and also founded Metron, a journal in which Fisher and other outstanding statisticians published fundamental papers in statistics.
- At the University of Rome he served as a professor from 1925 and was the first Dean of the Faculty of Statistics.
- In Rome he also founded and served as the first president of Istat, the Italian Institute of Statistics, from 1926 to 1932.
Even today the concentration index that Gini proposed almost a century ago is used all over the world and by scholars in all disciplines concerned with a scientific-quantitative approach. His brilliance was also revealed through the innovations he brought to various statistical fields that are today considered schools of thought (among others, the empirical Bayesian approach) and the quantitative approach he instilled in social disciplines such as demography, sociology, economics and forensics.

The multimedia exhibit on "Gini and Statistics in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century" is aimed at situating Gini in the emerging age of statistics as a scientific discipline, both in Italy and abroad. The exhibit will travel from university to university and to other institutions where Gini worked and will be finally located at Istat, the institute founded by Gini in 1926, where he served as president for six years.

A half-day workshop on "Compositional data (CoDa) methods in the analysis of customer surveys" is going to be organized by prof. Ron Kenett on the morning of 7 September. The workshop is addressed to both early graduates and people whose job involves customer surveys. In this workshop applications of CoDa methodology to the analysis of customer surveys are presented and findings are compared to what is presented in the book by Kenett and Salini (2011). The workshop will last 4 hours with one coffee break.

Workshop's flier download

prof. Luigi Biggeri (University of Florence)
prof. Gian Carlo Blangiardo (State University of Milan)
prof. Furio Camillo (University of Bologna)
prof. Andrea Cammelli (University of Bologna, AlmaLaurea)
prof. Luigi Campiglio (Catholic University of Sacred Hearth of Milan)
prof. Giovanni A. Fava (University of Bologna, State University of New York at Buffalo)
prof. B. Vittorio Frosini (Catholic University of Sacred Heart of Milan)
prof. Andrea Furlan (University of Padua)
prof. Paolo Garbolino (IUAV University of Venice)
prof. Giovanni Maria Giorgi (Sapienza University of Rome)
prof. Luciano Greco (University of Padua)
prof. Ron Kenett (University of Turin, KPA)
prof. Giuseppe Leti (Sapienza University of Rome)
prof. Julia Mortera (Third University of Rome)
prof. Fortunato Pesarin (University of Padua)
prof. Carlo Rosati (Virginia Commonwealth University, FBI, USA)
prof. Italo Scardovi (University of Bologna)
prof. Franco Taroni (University of Lausanne, CH)
prof. Giorgio Vittadini (Biccoca University of Milan)
prof. Michele Zenga (Bicocca University of Milan)

A contest with two prizes of 700 and 350 Euros has been announced for the best papers on applied statistics submitted by young scholars for publication, after refereeing, to any of the official journals of the conference. The contest is open to scholars aged 39 or less as of 8 September 2015. The scientific contribution of the contestant must be explicit from the paper. The prize is sponsored by the Franca and Diego De Castro Foundation.

Participants and accompanying persons are invited to have dinner together at a Padua restaurant. Alumni of the Padua Statistical Faculty and representatives of Gini's family will also be invited to attend the dinner.

It is request confirm of partecipation at the social dinner to be sent at the email address convegnogini@stat.unipd.it.