page_title: Wilhelm Lexis
section_title: Lexis diagram
hierarchical_section_title: Wilhelm Lexis / Work / Lexis diagram
caption_attribution_description: English: Original Lexis diagram
context_page_description: Wilhelm Lexis, full name Wilhelm Hector Richard Albrecht Lexis, was a German statistician, economist, and social scientist. The Oxford Dictionary of Statistics cites him as a "pioneer of the analysis of demographic time series". Lexis is largely remembered for two items that bear his name—the Lexis ratio and the Lexis diagram.
context_section_description: Although it can take various forms, the typical Lexis diagram is a graphical illustration of the lifetime of either an individual or a cohort of same-aged individuals.  On the diagram, each such lifetime appears as a straight line in a two-dimensional plane, with one dimension representing time and the other representing age.  The use of Lexis diagrams is very common amongst demographers, so much so that they often are used without being identified as Lexis diagrams.
  Lexis introduced his diagram in his first book, Introduction to the Theory of Population Statistics (Strasbourg: Trubner, 1875).  However, the notion of using a time vs. age diagram appears to have been developed more or less simultaneously by other authors.  See the paper by Vandeschrick (2001) for more detail.
caption: Original Lexis diagram (1875)
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