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Francis Ysidro Edgeworth ( February 8, 1845 - February 13, 1926) was an Irish polymath who studied at Trinity College, Dublin before obtaining a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford where he subsequently became a professor. A deep thinker, his contributions were far ahead of his time.Edgeworth was a highly influential figure in the development of neo-classical economics. He was the first to apply certain formal mathematical techniques to individual decision making in economics. He developed utility theory introducing the indifference curve and the famous Edgeworth box which is now familiar to undergraduates of microeconomics. The high degree of originality demonstrated in his most important book on economics, Mathematical Psychics, was matched only by the difficulty of reading it. He frequently referenced literary sources and interspersed the writing with passages in a number of languages, including as Latin, French and Ancient Greek.
Alfred Marshall, the most influential economist of the time, commented in his review of Mathematical Psychics[1]:
- This book shows clear signs of genius, and is a promise of great things to come... His readers may sometimes wish that he had kept his work by him a little longer till he had worked it out a little more fully, and obtained that simplicity which comes only through long labour. But taking it as what it claims to be, 'a tentative study', we can only admire its brilliancy, force, and originality.
While Jevons noted [2]:
- Whatever else readers of this book may think about it, they would probably all agree that it is a very remarkable one... There can be no doubt that in the style of his composition Mr. Edgeworth does not do justice to his matter. His style, if not obscure, is implicit, so that the reader is left to puzzle out every important sentence like an enigma.
He was the editor of the Economic Journal from its creation in 1891 and was succeeded in this role by John Maynard Keynes in 1926.
As a self-taught mathematical statistician he is remembered by the eponymous Edgeworth seriesThe Edgeworth series or Gram-Charlier A series named in honor of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, are series that approximate a probability distribution in terms of its cumulants. Gram-Charlier A series The key idea of these expansions is to write the characteri.
He was also a barristerIn many common law jurisdictions, a barrister or advocate is a type of lawyer, particularly one entitled to appear before the superior courts of that jurisdiction. Details vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Barristers in England and Wales The legal p, and held the Tooke chair of Economic Science at King's CollegeThere are a number of institutions known as King's College King's College, Cambridge, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge King's College London, a college of the University of London King's College School, a school originally founded to f, London and later the Drummond Chair of Political EconomyPolitical economy was the original term for the study of relations of production, especially between the three main classes of capitalist (or bourgeois) society: capitalists, workers and landowners. In contradistinction to the theory of the physiocrats, i at Oxford.
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Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro
Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro
Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro
