Edgeworth

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth


Born: 1845 in Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland
Died: 1926 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

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Francis Edgeworth came to study statistics after an education in classical literature.

In 1881 he published Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences. This work, really on economics, looks at the Economical Calculus and the Utilitarian Calculus. He formulated mathematically a capacity for happiness and a capacity for work. His conclusions that women have less capacity for pleasure and for work than do men would not be popular in the 1990's.

Edgeworth published Methods of Statistics in 1885 which presented an exposition of the application and interpretation of significance tests for the comparison of means.

In 1892 Edgeworth examined correlation and methods of estimating correlation coefficients in a series of papers. The first of these papers was Correlated Averages .

Edgeworth's work was to influence Pearson although bad feeling developed between the two and later Pearson was to deny Edgeworth's influence.

Other Web sites:

Drexel University, USA

References:

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. S M Stigler, The History of Statistics. The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, Mass.-London, 1986), 305- .
  3. M G Kendall, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, 1845-1926, Biometrika 55 (1968), 269-275.

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JOC/EFR February 1996