What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 19 February 2023.

Korčákova was built in 2009.

Jaromír Korčák was born in Vrážné, near Svitavy, in 1898. After studying natural history and geography in Prague, he became a commissioner at the State Statistical Office.

In 1948, he qualified as an Associate Professor in demography at the Charles University, becoming a Professor of Geography in 1951. The department split in two in 1953, and Korčák became Head of Economic and Regional Geography until 1960.

He was vice-president of the Czechoslovak Geographical Society from 1961 to 1962, and then its president from 1962 to 1969.

He died in 1989, aged 94.

The Faculty of Natural Sciences, located on nearby Albertov, has an auditorium named after him.

Also named after him is Korčák’s Distribution, or Korčak’s Law, which is a ‘type of statistical distribution characterised by unidirectional skewness’, and it would probably be very unwise to ask me to explain that any further.