Professor Doctor habilitatus h.c.h.c. Z.H. Hellwig was born on 26 May 1925 in the small town of Dokszyce, not far from Wilno. Both of his parents were teachers. His father, Henry Hellwig, taught German and his mother taught Mathematics. Prof. Z. Hellwig was educated at King Zygmunt August Gimnazjum in Wilno. However his secondary school graduation certificate (’matura’ in Polish) he only obtained after the Second World War in Wrocław, in 1947. In the same year he enrolledin the Wyższa Szkoła Ekonomiczna (University of Economics) in Wrocław, from which he graduated in 1950 with a Bachelor’s Degree. In 1952 he received his Master’s Degree (‘magister’ in Polish) in Theory of Statistics at The Principal School of Planning and Statistics (SGPiS ) in Warsaw. Whilst student of the second year in the Higher Commercial School (Wyższa Szkoła Handlowa in Polish), he started to work at this school as a junior assistant. On the basis of the paper “Linear regression and its applications in economics”, he defended in 1958 his Ph.D. degree in Economic Sciences (officially the name of this degree was Kandydat Nauk Ekonomicznych, that is Candidate of Economic Sciences). In 1967 he became Professor of Economics, and in 1972 he was nominated as (full) Professor in Economics. In 1962 Prof. Z. Hellwig was nominated as Head of Department of Statistics and held this post until 1995, the year when he retired. Although Professor Hellwig retired from his chair, he continued to work quite regularly in his office. Professor Hellwig had an unusual prophetic abilities. When only a few people in Poland were seriously thinking about the future of an electronic brain, Professor Hellwig organized an educational and study centre for computer programming and data processing. Under his leadership there were published for the first time in Poland a series of textbooks on programming languages, scientific computations using a computer machine. When Poland was undergoing the change of political system, Z. Hellwig proposed to organize the Lower Silesian Business School for the study and teaching of financial mathematics and actuarial statistics.In 2005 the first conference on actuarial statistics was organized in Poland, dedicated to Professor Hellwig on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This conference was attended by practically all the prominent Polish statisticians.

This short biography is based on the paper by Walenty Ostasiewicz "Professor Zdzisław Henryk Hellwig (26.05.1925-8.11.2013)" published in Silesian Statistical Review issue 13(19), DOI: 10.15611/sps.2015.13.12