Professor Dr. Arnd Graf von Westarp, who was appointed Professor of General Business Administration at the Hamburg School of Business Administration at the beginning of 2022, gave his inaugural lecture yesterday in HSBA's Peter Möhrle Lounge. The business mathematician and shipping expert used a model to impressively demonstrate the use of big data to solve the question of happiness and what Sherlock Holmes has to do with it.
Sherlock Holmes and the Search for the Happiness of All Nations
Is there a connection between Sherlock Holmes and the question of happiness in different nations? And how can we find out what makes people happy or what they need to be happy? Professor Arnd Graf von Westarp explored these questions during his inaugural lecture. Based on Sherlock Holmes detective stories, he illuminated the deductive approach to solving criminal cases and contrasted it with the inductive approach used in the application of Big Data analyses. In the deductive approach, conclusions are drawn from assumptions with the help of logic; inductive means that a larger context is inferred from several individual observations.
Arnd Graf von Westarp showed in a very entertaining way how Big Data can be used to solve criminal cases and other questions. At the end of his lecture, he tried to fathom deductively and inductively what makes people and nations happy and whether people in North Korea are happier than Germans. To do this, he listed various factors such as freedom, family or speed limit that contribute to happiness in a decision tree, a mathematical model that can be used to find decisions. But happiness, according to the quintessence of his lecture, can be derived neither inductively nor deductively: Happiness is ultimately a subjective perception and a question of attitude.
Arnd Graf von Westarp studied business mathematics from 2000 to 2006 and graduated with a diploma. From 2007 he worked in the Business Development Department of the shipping company Hamburg Süd. In order to better approach practice theoretically, he studied at the HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration in 2012/2013 and graduated with an MBA in Shipping. In the following years, he worked as a lecturer at HSBA, FOM - Hochschule für Oekonomie und Management, IU and HAW - Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg in the Master's and Bachelor's fields. In 2015, he took up his doctorate at the University of Regensburg and completed his dissertation on the topic of "Development of digitalisation options in liner shipping under consideration of uncertainties" with Summa cum Laude in 2021. In January 2022, he was appointed professor at the Hamburg School of Business Administration.