Page 108 - Življenjska pot matematika Iva Laha

was a correspondent of the International Committee of Actuaries in Brussels. He es-
tablished many contacts with actuarial institutes in Europe, North and South America
and Asia. His pro rata temporis formulas found their way into international conventions.

In 1932 he introduced several statistics in Slovenia, the Kingdom of the SHS and then
in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. At the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana he lectured to
students and gave seminars and courses in statistics, social insurance, and actuarial
science. His work has been used by several students in the preparation of their doctoral
dissertations.

He was the first in Yugoslavia to work systematically on statistics, actuarial science,
and social insurance, producing several calculations and dozens of demographic tables.

Already during the occupation of the country after 1941, during the Ljubljana Province,
he prepared the First Slovene Table - Mortality Table 1931-1933 - and new calculation
bases for social insurance.

The Computational Basis of Social Insurance is his most important professional work,
on which he worked from 1923 onwards. It was published in 1947 in Zagreb in book form
and in Croatian.

The Accounting Basics ... served the FNRJ delegation and the expert Lah in Rome in
1949/50 as a basis for calculating war indemnities - in the large sums of billions of for-
eign exchange dinars and hundreds of millions of German marks; however, the author-
ities declared them to be anti-Marxist and confiscated and destroyed them as harmful
to the socialist system.

Lah's oeuvre covers a wide range of activities, from social, pension, disability insurance,
statistics, health, demography, etc. He published around 100 scientific studies and pa-
pers, 36 of them internationally in Europe, Asia, North and South America. He published
several thousand statistical and informative notes, reports, and articles in the country.

Lah's greatest scientific achievement was the invention of the Lah numbers, first pub-
lished in Portugal in 1954 and named after the Slovenian mathematician by John Ri-
ordan, a mathematician who placed Lah in the top rank of world-renowned combinat-
orics.

Ivo Lah as a fiction writer is recognised by his more modest literary legacy, in the deep
shadow of his mathematical greatness, but in which he proved to be a brilliant observer
of nature, folk customs and characters, a clear-eyed recollection with a critical view of
both the real and the illusory world. His writings reflect the times he lived in, with real
adventures from his childhood, school, academic and retirement years.
Most fascinating is Lah's satirical pamphlet »Einstein's Relative Age«. It is a reportage
under the pseudonym Dreistein, in which he takes a swipe at the utopian theory of rel-
ativity, which is supposed to allow the rejuvenation of people, the creation of history

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