Arthur Lyon Bowley
| Arthur Lyon Bowley | |
|---|---|
| Born | 6 November 1869 Bristol |
| Died |
21 January 1957 (aged 87) Surrey |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Statistics |
| Institutions | London School of Economics |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Known for | Bowley's law |
| Notable awards | Guy Medal (silver, 1895) (Gold, 1935) |
Sir Arthur Lyon Bowley (Bristol, 6 November 1869 – Surrey, 21 January 1957) was an English statistician and economist who worked on economic statistics and pioneered the use of sampling techniques in social surveys.
Bowley's father, James William Lyon Bowley, was a minister in the Church of England. He died in 1870 when Arthur was under two, leaving Arthur's mother as mother or stepmother to seven children. Arthur was educated at a Christ's Hospital, and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics. He graduated as Tenth Wrangler.
At Cambridge Bowley had a short course of study with the economist Alfred Marshall who had also been a Cambridge wrangler. Under Marshall's influence Bowley became an economic statistician. His Account of England's Foreign Trade won the Cobden Essay Prize and was published as a book. Marshall watched over Bowley's career, recommending him for jobs and offering him advice. Most notoriously Marshall told him the Elements of Statistics contained "too much mathematics."
After leaving Cambridge Bowley taught mathematics at St John's School in Leatherhead from 1893 to 1899. Meanwhile, he was publishing in economic statistics; his first article for the journal of the Royal Statistical Society) appeared in 1895. In that year the London School of Economics opened. Bowley was appointed as a part-time lecturer and he would be connected with the School until he retired in 1936. He can be considered one of the School's intellectual fathers. However, he continued to teach elsewhere; for more than a decade he taught at University College, Reading (now the University of Reading). He was the Newmarch lecturer at University College, London (1897–98 and 1927–28). At the LSE he became Reader in 1908, and Professor in 1915. In 1919 he was appointed to a newly established Chair of Statistics, probably the first of its kind in Britain. In Bowley's time, however, the LSE statistics group was very small: E. C. Rhodes arrived in 1924 and R. G. D. Allen in 1928.
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