The Italian scientist Corrado Gini was born into a wealthy land-owning family in Treviso in 1884. Gini was an academic prodigy; by the age of twenty-six he was head of statistics at Cagliari University. A cold, hard-working, autocratic figure, he befriended Mussolini early on in his career, becoming head of Il Duce’s Central Institute of Statistics. By the time he died, Gini was widely judged to be the greatest Italian statistician of all time, credited with paving new ground in the fields of demography, sociology and economics.
