Life
Anderson was born into Baltic German family in Minsk in the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus), but soon moved to Kazan. His father, Nikolai Anderson, was professor in Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Kazan. His older brothers were the folklorist Walter Anderson and the astrophysicist Wilhelm Anderson.
Oskar Anderson graduated from Kazan Gymnasium with a gold medal in 1906. After studying mathematics for one year at Kazan Federal University, he moved to St. Petersburg to study economics at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. From 1907 to 1915, he was Aleksandr Chuprov's student and assistant. In 1912, he married Margarethe Natalie von Hindenburg-Hirtenberg, a granddaughter of Wilhelm Paul von Hindenburg-Hirtenberg [ru], who was commemorated in "The Funeral of 'The Universal Man'" in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's A Writer's Diary, and started lecturing at a commercial school in St. Petersburg while also studying for a law degree at Saint Petersburg State University, graduating in 1914.
In 1918, he took on a professorship in Kiev but he was forced to flee Russia in 1920 due to the Russian Revolution, first taking a post in Budapest, Hungary, before becoming a professor at the University of Economics Varna in Bulgaria, in 1924.
Anderson was one of the charter members of the Econometric Society, whose members also elected him to be a fellow of the society in 1933. In the same year, he also received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Supported by the foundation, in 1935 he established and became director of the Statistical Institute for Economic Research at Sofia University. For the remainder of the decade, he also served the League of Nations as an associate member of its Committee of Statistical Experts.
In 1942, he joined the Kiel Institute for the World Economy as the head of the Department of Eastern Studies and also took up a full professorship of statistics at Kiel University, where he was joined by his brother Walter after the end of the Second World War. In 1947, he took a position at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, teaching there until 1956, when he retired.
