Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth FBA (8 February 1845 – 13 February 1926) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward, he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal.
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
8 February 1845
13 February 1926 (aged 81)
Guy Medal (Gold, 1907)
Philosophy, political economist
Life[edit]
Ysidro Francis Edgeworth – the order of his forenames later reversed – was born in Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland, the son of Francis Beaufort Edgeworth and his wife, Rosa Florentina, daughter of exiled Catalan general Antonio Eroles.[1] Francis Beaufort Edgeworth, when "a restless philosophy student at Cambridge on his way to Germany", had met Rosa, a teenage Spanish refugee, on the steps of the British Museum, and they subsequently eloped. Francis Beaufort Edgeworth was the son of politician, writer, and inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth (father also of the writer Maria Edgeworth), by his fourth wife, the botanical artist and memoirist Frances Anne, daughter of the Anglican clergyman and geographer Daniel Augustus Beaufort, of French Huguenot origin. The Edgeworth family, which settled in Ireland in the 1580s, was distinguished, descending from Francis Edgeworth, joint Clerk of the Crown and Hanaper in 1606, who inherited a fortune from his brother Edward Edgeworth, Bishop of Down and Connor. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was a descendant, through his mother, of the English judge Sir Salathiel Lovell.
The youngest of seven children, Edgeworth did not attend school, but was educated by private tutors at the Edgeworthstown estate until he reached the age to enter university.[2]
As a student at Trinity College Dublin he studied classics getting a scholarship in 1863 and graduating in 1865, and at Balliol College, Oxford, Edgeworth studied ancient and modern languages. A voracious autodidact, he studied mathematics and economics only after he had completed university. He qualified as a barrister in London in 1877 but did not practise.[3]
On the basis of his publications in economics and mathematical statistics in the 1880s, Edgeworth was appointed to a chair in economics at King's College London in 1888, and in 1891, he was appointed Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University. In 1891, he was also appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal. He continued as editor or joint-editor until his death 35 years later.[4]
The Royal Statistical Society awarded him the Guy Medal in Gold in 1907. Edgeworth served as the president of the Royal Statistical Society, 1912–14. In 1928, Arthur Lyon Bowley published a book entitled and devoted to F. Y. Edgeworth's Contributions to Mathematical Statistics.
