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Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was born February 8, 1845, in Edgeworthstown, Longford, Ireland. Edgeworth is recognized as a brilliant and eccentric economist, statistician, and social philosopher. He is especially known for his development of mathematical models of rational behavior, which he used to build models of mutually beneficial trade. Born the fifth son of a father who had been a sixth son, Edgeworth actually ended up inheriting the entire Edgeworthstown estate in 1911, when all other lines of the family died out or produced no heirs. Edgeworth’s education consisted of private tutoring followed by higher education at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Exeter and Balliol Colleges, Oxford. His university studies were in ancient and modern languages, and during the 1870s he added a self-taught education in mathematics and economics. In 1881, Edgeworth earned a position teaching logic and political economy at King’s College, London (Edgeworth 1881). Ten...
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References
Edgeworth, F. Y. (1881). Mathematical psychics: An essay on the application of mathematics to the moral sciences. London: Kegan Paul.
Edgeworth, F. Y. (1885–1886). The calculus of probabilities applied to psychic research, Parts I & II. Proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research, 3 and 4, 190–199 and 189–208.
FitzPatrick, P. J. (1960). Leading British statisticians of the nineteenth century. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 55, 38–70.
Newman, P. (2001). Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro (1845–1926). In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 4170–4175).
Newman, P. (Ed.). (2003). F.Y. Edgeworth: Mathematical psychics, and further papers on political economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Seim, D.L. (2012). Edgeworth, F. Y.. In: Rieber, R.W. (eds) Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0463-8_200
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