Roberto Bachi

Roberto Bachi was born in 1909 in Rome

Roberto Bachi was born in Rome in 1909 to an Italian Jewish family. His father, Riccardo Bachi, was an economist. He went to the Tasso gymnasium in Rome.

He studied law and statistics at the University of Rome and earned a doctorate in law. He then taught statistics at several Italian universities, including Sassari and Genoa, and became a full professor in 1937.

After Italy passed its racial laws in 1938, he left Genoa and moved with his family to the Land of Israel. He worked as a statistician at Hadassah, began teaching at the Hebrew University in 1940, and joined the statistics department of the Mandate government in 1945. He studied the falling fertility of Jewish women in the Yishuv.

When the state was founded, he became Government Statistician and led the Central Bureau of Statistics until 1971. He helped start the first census in 1948 and later ran the 1967 census. At the Hebrew University he was the first dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and served as prorector in 1959 and 1960.

He retired from the university as professor emeritus and focused on geostatistics and the graphic display of data. He received the Israel Prize in 1982 and died in 1995.