David Gawen Champernowne
David Gawen Champernowne (born July 9, 1912 in Oxford , † August 19, 2000 in Budleigh Salterton , Devon) was a British economist and mathematician.
Champernowne attended Winchester College and studied from 1931 at Cambridge University (King's College) with a scholarship. There he befriended his fellow student Alan Turing . First he studied mathematics and after two years turned to economics under the influence of John Maynard Keynes , who at that time was working on his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money . One of his first publications was a review of Keynes' major work in 1936 in the Review of Economic Studies. In the same year he submitted his dissertation on income distributions (published as a book in 1973). In 1936 he became Assistant Lecturer at the London School of Economics and in 1938 University Lecturer in Statistics at Cambridge. During the Second World War he worked for the government as a statistician, initially under Frederick Alexander Lindemann . When he criticized the bombing of working-class neighborhoods in Germany, he was transferred to a ministry office for aircraft production, where the economist John Jewkes was his supervisor.
In 1945 he went to Oxford University as a Fellow of Nuffield College and Director of the University's Institute of Statistics. In 1948 he became a professor of statistics. He mainly dealt with business statistics. In an article from 1948 (Sampling theory applied to autoregressive sequences, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society) he applied Bayesian theory to time series. In 1959 he went back to Cambridge University as a reader in economics. He also became a Fellow of Trinity College. It was not until 1970 that he received a full professorship. In 1978 he retired. In the 1990s he began to show signs of Alzheimer's disease and he moved to Budleigh Salterton near his son. He is buried in St. Mary, Dartington.
After the war he worked with Alan Turing on chess computer programs (Turochamp). Both were good chess players too. They found the development of the program arduous with the means at the time, but predicted that their program could definitely hold its own against a beginner, which they tested on the wife of Champernowne.
In 1933 he gave one of the first constructions of a normal number ( Champernowne number ), published in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society.
In 1970 he was elected to the British Academy .
In 1948 he married Mieke Dullaert, with whom he had two sons.
Fonts
- Uncertainty and Estimation in Economics, 3 volumes 1969
- The Distribution of Income between Persons, 1973
- with Frank A. Cowell: Economic Inequality and Income Distribution, 1998
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : David Gawen Champernowne. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
Individual evidence
- ^ Extension of his dissertation (Prize Fellowship Dissertation) from 1936
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Champernowne, David Gawen |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British mathematician, economist and statistician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 9, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Oxford |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 19, 2000 |
| Place of death | Budleigh Salterton |