Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845 to 1926) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. Born at Edgeworthstown in County Longford, Ireland, he was educated by private tutors, then studied classics at Trinity College Dublin and at Balliol College, Oxford, and came to mathematics and economics as a self-taught adult. He became professor of economics at King's College London in 1888 and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford in 1891, and was founding editor of The Economic Journal until his death. In economics he developed utility theory, the indifference curve and the Edgeworth box, and in his 1881 book Mathematical Psychics he showed that as the number of agents grows the indeterminacy of contract shrinks, the result known as Edgeworth's limit theorem. In statistics he is remembered for the Edgeworth series, and the Royal Statistical Society awarded him its Guy Medal in Gold in 1907.