Agner ErlangBorn 1 Jan 1878; died 3 Feb 1929 at age 51.Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician who was a pioneer in the study of telecommunications traffic. He developed mathematical theories applying the theory of probability, while working for the Copenhagen Telephone Company. He provided significant insights for planning the operation of automatic telephone exchanges that proved so useful that his formulas were used by telephone companies in other countries, including Britain. He died unexpectedly at age 51. Nearly two decades after his early death, an international committee for telephone communications applied his name to the erlang unit to be the International Unit of Telephone Traffic. The Erlang distribution, also known by his name, refers to the statistical probability distribution that he used in his work, a special case of the Gamma distribution, used for traffic models.« |
