Miremahe · CC BY-SA 4.0

Lazarsfeld founded Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research and, in doing so, largely defined what empirical, quantitative sociology in America would look like for decades afterward — a colleague put it starkly: "it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said his own goal was simply "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds," training a generation of researchers in the methods he had built.