Francis Edgeworth

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (February 8, 1845 - February 13, 1926) was an Irish polymath who studied at Trinity College, Dublin before obtaining a scholarship to and subsequently a professorship at Oxford. A deep thinker, his contributions were far ahead of his time.

He was the first to apply a formal mathematical approach to understanding individual decision making in economics. He developed utility theory introducing the indifference curve and the famous Edgeworth box familiar to undergraduates of microeconomics. He was the editor of the Economic Journal from its creation in 1891 and was succeeded in this role by John Maynard Keynes in 1926.

As a self-taught mathematical statistician he is remembered by the eponymous Edgeworth series.

He was also a barrister, and held the Tooke chair of Economic Science at King's College, London and later the Drummond Chair of Political Economy at Oxford.