His family had settled in Ireland in the sixteenth century, and had given their name to the town that subsequently developed. Edgeworth was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (studying modern languages) and Oxford U (studying classics). He then studied law, being called to the bar in 1877, and also mathematics, so that his first academic post, in 1880, was as Lecturer in Logic at KCL. In 1891 he became Professor of Political Economy at Oxford U, where he inaugurated the Economics Journal. Though much of his time was devoted to economics, he developed the early theory of correlation, estimation, and the application of the normal distribution. Edgeworth lived extremely simply, with few personal possessions: an exaggerated claim was that these were limited to red tape and gum. He was President of the RSS from 1912 to 1914 and was awarded its Guy Medal in Gold in 1907.

http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/walras/bios/edgeworth.html Information and photograph.