Max Otto Lorenz ( ; September 19, 1876 – July 1, 1959) was an American

economist An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social sciences, social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this ...

who developed the

Lorenz curve In economics, the Lorenz curve is a graphical representation of the distribution of income or of wealth. It was developed by Max O. Lorenz in 1905 for representing Economic inequality, inequality of the wealth distribution. The curve is a graph ...

in an undergraduate essay. He published a paper on this when he was a doctoral student at the

University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...

. His doctoral thesis (1906) was on 'The Economic Theory of Railroad Rates' and made no reference to perhaps his most famous paper. The term "

" for the measure Lorenz invented was coined by Willford I. King in 1912. He was of German ancestry, his father having been born in

Essen Essen () is the central and, after Dortmund, second-largest city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany. Its population of makes it the fourth-largest city of North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne, Düsseldorf and Dortmund, as well as ...

in the

Rhine Province The Rhine Province (), also known as Rhenish Prussia () or synonymous with the Rhineland (), was the westernmost Provinces of Prussia, province of the Kingdom of Prussia and the Free State of Prussia, within the German Reich, from 1822 to 1946. ...

of the

Kingdom of Prussia The Kingdom of Prussia (, ) was a German state that existed from 1701 to 1918.Marriott, J. A. R., and Charles Grant Robertson. ''The Evolution of Prussia, the Making of an Empire''. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. It played a signif ...

in 1841. He was active in both publishing and teaching and was at various times employed by the U.S.

Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau, officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. federal statistical system, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The U.S. Census Bureau is part of the U ...

, the U.S. Bureau of Railway Economics, the U.S. Bureau of Statistics and the U.S.

Interstate Commerce Commission The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was a regulatory agency in the United States created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The agency's original purpose was to regulate railroads (and later Trucking industry in the United States, truc ...

. In 1917 he was elected as a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 27, 1839, and is the second-oldest continuous ...

.List of ASA Fellows
, retrieved 2016-07-16. He was married to Nellie, and fathered three sons.

External links

* Lorenz, M. O. (1905). ''Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth'' Publications of the

. Vol. 9 (New Series, No. 70) 209–219. * Richard T. Ely, Adams, Thomas A. Adams, Max O. Lorenz, and Allyn Young (1908). ''Outlines of Economics''. New York: Macmillan. * King, W.I. (1912). ''The Elements of Statistical Method''. New York: Macmillan. * A discussion of generalised Lorenz curves

* Some history of economists from the

school around

John R. Commons John Rogers Commons (October 13, 1862 – May 11, 1945) was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early years John R. Commons was born in Hollansburg, Ohio o ...

* *

References

1876 births 1959 deaths University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni University of Iowa alumni Fellows of the American Statistical Association People from Sunnyvale, California American people of German descent Economists from California People from Burlington, Iowa Economists from Iowa {{US-economist-stub