Irénée-Jules Bienaymé

Irénée-Jules Bienaymé, who always used the name Jules, was a French statistician, born in Paris on 28 August 1796. He built on the legacy of Laplace by generalising his least squares method, and contributed to probability and statistics and to their application to finance, demography and the social sciences. He formulated the Bienaymé-Chebyshev inequality concerning the law of large numbers and the Bienaymé formula for the variance of a sum of uncorrelated random variables. After he left the civil service he lectured on probability at the Faculty of Sciences, and from 1852 he sat in the Paris Academy of Sciences, serving for 23 years as referee for its statistics prize. He died in Paris in 1878.