Bortkiewicz studied law as an undergraduate at U St Petersburg. His doctorate was obtained from U Göttingen in 1893. After a period in Strasbourg he returned to St Petersburg and it was there, in 1898, that he published a work entitled The Law of Small Numbers that dealt with properties of the Poisson distribution and introduced the Prussian horse-kick data that have become familiar to generations of students of Statistics. In 1901 he settled at U Berlin, becoming Professor of Statistics and Political Economy in 1920.