Saddest thing I read today (Schumpeter):

"[Bortkiewicz] was not a good lecturer, and his lectures, which he elaborated with a minute and conscientious attention to details all his own, were said to be delivered to rather empty classrooms.

His critical acumen made people fear him, but it hardly contributed to making them love him."

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FYI: In 1898 Bortkiewicz published a book about the Poisson distribution, titled The Law of Small Numbers. In this book he first noted that events with low frequency in a large population follow a Poisson distribution even when the probabilities of the events varied. It was that book that made the Prussian cavalry horse-kick data famous. The data give the number of soldiers killed by being kicked by a horse each year in each of 14 cavalry corps over a 20-year period. Bortkiewicz showed that those numbers follow a Poisson distribution. Some historians of mathematics have even argued that the Poisson distribution should have been named the "Bortkiewicz distribution."

It is in his work on Karl Marx - whom he simply saw as one descendant of Ricardo - that his claim to fame lies. Bortkiewicz's solution to the Marx's "Transformation Problem" (1907) is considered legendary, although it was ignored at the time. Bortkiewicz was also involved in other theoretical controversies - particularly against Böhm-Bawerk and the Austrian theory of interest and also against the Alfred Weber's theory of industrial location.

More here and here.