Jan Czekanowski
Encyclopedia
Jan Czekanowski was a Polish
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 anthropologist, statistician
Statistician
A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...

 and linguist
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

. Czekanowski is known for having played an important role in saving the Polish
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

-Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

n branch of the Karaim
Karaim
Karaim may refer to:*Crimean Karaites, the article about this group, and*Karaim language, the article about their language.*Karaite Judaism, a Jewish movement....

 people from Holocaust extermination. In 1942 he managed to convince a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 "race scientists" that the Karaim
Karaim
Karaim may refer to:*Crimean Karaites, the article about this group, and*Karaim language, the article about their language.*Karaite Judaism, a Jewish movement....

 were of Turkic
Turkic peoples
The Turkic peoples are peoples residing in northern, central and western Asia, southern Siberia and northwestern China and parts of eastern Europe. They speak languages belonging to the Turkic language family. They share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds...

 origin although professing Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

 and using Hebrew as a liturgical language. This helped the Karaim
Karaim
Karaim may refer to:*Crimean Karaites, the article about this group, and*Karaim language, the article about their language.*Karaite Judaism, a Jewish movement....

 people escape the tragic destiny of other European Jews and the Romas.

Life

Czekanowski attended school in Warsaw but was transferred to Latvia, where he finished his education in 1901. He then entered a university in Zurich in 1902; there, he studied anthropology, mathematics, anatomy, and ethnography as a pupil of Swiss anthropologist Rudolph Martin, author of the popular anthropology textbook Lehrbuch der Anthropologie. In 1907 Czekanowski defended his PhD. dissertation. For the dissertation's research he traveled to the Royal Museum in Berlin and to Middle Africa from 1906-1907. While in Africa, he led a team into the Congo to collect ethnographic materials. While working on studying the societies of Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

, he developed various statistical methods and contributed to the field of taxonomy
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...

. The research he made in Africa has since been published in five volumes and sent in 1910 to Saint Petersburg ethnography. He then became a professor at the University of Lwów and University of Poznań. While working he introduced an innovative take on mathematical statistics. He worked in these universities from 1913 to 1945. In addition, he worked at UAM from 1937-1946, where he researched the dynmaics of evolution in human populations. He played numerous scientific roles at the UAM, including vice-chairman of the Polish Social Statistic Company.

Racial classification

Czekanowski classified Europe into four pure races. The four pure races were the Nordic, Ibero-Insular, Lapponoid and Armenoid. The Lapponoid included the central and eastern Europeans along Europe longitudely as well as the Sami people
Sami people
The Sami people, also spelled Sámi, or Saami, are the arctic indigenous people inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of far northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border area between south and middle Sweden and Norway. The Sámi are Europe’s northernmost...

 of Northern Europe.

Czekanowski classified six subraces in Europe which were mixed types of the pure races. The six mixed racial subraces were: the Northwestern (Nordic and Ibero-Insular), the Subnordic (Nordic and Lapponoid), Alpine (Lapponoid and Armenoid), the Littoral (Ibero-Insular and Armenoid), Pile Dwelling (Ibero-Insular and Lapponoid) and the Dinaric (Nordic and Armenoid). The Pile Dwelling subrace lived around the Swiss lakes.

Linguistics

Czekanowski introduced numerical taxonomy
Numerical taxonomy
Numerical taxonomy is a classification system in biological systematics which deals with the grouping by numerical methods of taxonomic units based on their character states.. It aims to create a taxonomy using numeric algorithms like cluster analysis rather than using subjective evaluation of...

 into comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....

, thus founding the discipline of computational linguistics
Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....

. He developed (1913) a still much-used index of similarity
Sørensen similarity index
The Sørensen index, also known as Sørensen’s similarity coefficient, is a statistic used for comparing the similarity of two samples. It was developed by the botanist Thorvald Sørensen and published in 1948....

 between two samples. He applied it to phonemes and words in text corpora
Text corpus
In linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts...

 of different languages. It was later introduced in analysis of ecological
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...

 communities
Community (ecology)
In ecology, a community is an assemblage of two or more populations of different species occupying the same geographical area. The term community has a variety of uses...

.

Books

  • Zarys metod statystycznych w zastosowaniu do antropologii [An outline of statistical methods applied in anthropology]. Warszawa: Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie (1913)
  • Człowiek w czasie i przestrzeni (1934)
  • Polska - Słowiańszczyzna. Perspektywy antropologiczne (1948)
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