Moore, Henry Ludwell (1869–1958)

Abstract

An outstanding pioneer econometrician, Moore was a retiring, highly sensitive, intensely dedicated man, who devoted his whole life to the construction of ‘a statistical complement to economics’, as he termed it. He was born at Moore’s Rest, Maryland, on 21 November 1869. After graduating from Randolph Macon College in 1892, he studied under Carl Menger in Vienna, and Simon Newcomb and John Bates Clark at Johns Hopkins, where in 1896 he completed his Ph.D. dissertation on von Thünen’s theory of the natural wage. Following a year’s instructorship at Hopkins, and five years at Smith College, Moore taught at Columbia, mainly mathematical economics and statistics, from 1902 to 1929. Essentially a researcher rather than a pedagogue, he attended Karl Pearson’s courses on mathematical statistics and correlation in London, in 1909 and 1913, and for several years took a voluntary salary reduction in order to avoid undergraduate teaching. Ill health forced his early retirement.