Mathematician:David Gawen Champernowne

Mathematician

English economist and mathematician, famous for proving that the number now known as the Champernowne constant is normal with respect to base $10$.

A sometime colleague and lifelong friend of Alan Mathison Turing.

Nationality

English

History

• Born: 9 July 1912 in Oxford, England
• 1931: Won a scholarship to study mathematics at King's College, Cambridge
• Autumn 1931: Matriculated
• 1936: Appointed assistant lecturer at London School of Economics
• 1938: University lecturer in statistics at Cambridge
• 1940: Made a temporary Civil Servant, assigned to statistical section of Prime Minister's office as assistant to Frederick Alexander Lindemann
• 1945: Appointed as Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford
• 1945: Made director of Oxford University Institute of Statistics
• 1948: Appointed as Professor of Statistics at Oxford
• 1959: Return to Cambridge as Reader in Economics
• 1970: Appointed to Personal Professorship at Cambridge
• 1970: Elected to the British Academy
• 1978: Retired
• 1995: Moved to Budleigh Salterton
• Died: 19 August 2000 in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, England

Theorems and Definitions

• Champernowne Constant (also known as Mahler's Number for Kurt Mahler)
• Champernowne Distribution

Definitions of concepts named for David Gawen Champernowne can be found here.

Publications

• 1933: The Construction of Decimals Normal in the Scale of Ten (J. London Math. Soc. Vol. 8: pp. 254 – 260)
• 1936: Unemployment, Basic and Monetary: The Classical Analysis and the Keynesian (Rev. Econ. Stud. Vol. 3: pp. 201 – 216)  www.jstor.org/stable/2967628
• 1948: Sampling Theory applied to Autoregressive Sequences (J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Vol. 10: pp. 204 – 242)  www.jstor.org/stable/2983776
• 1969: Uncertainty and Estimation in Economics (3 volumes)
• 1973: The Distribution of Income between Persons
• 1998: Economic Inequality and Income Distribution (with Frank A. Cowell)

Also known as

Known to all as Champ.

Sources

• John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "David Gawen Champernowne": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive