Richard Price

Richard Price (1723 to 1791) was a Welsh-born moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician, and a political reformer who wrote pamphlets in support of radical, republican and liberal causes, including the French and American Revolutions. He was born at Tyn Ton, a farmhouse in the village of Llangeinor in Glamorgan, was educated privately and at dissenting academies, and spent most of his adult life in and around London, where he was minister of the Newington Green Unitarian Church. In mathematics he edited, published and developed the Bayes-Price theorem and helped found the field of actuarial science, and he also wrote on demography and finance. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and fostered communication among many people, among them Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet. The historian John Davies called him the greatest Welsh thinker of all time. He died in 1791.