Profile Major Works Resources

David Gawen Champernowne, 1912-2000.

Cambridge mathematician, statistician and economist. 

While still an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge, D.G. Champernowne made a mathematical splash with a contribution to normal numbers, what has become known as the "Champernowne constant".  Under the influence of Robertson, Pigou and Keynes, Champernowne nonetheless gravitated into economics. 

Famously, Champernowne was Keynes's tutorial student and lecture note-taker, and authored one of the initial reviews and expositions of the General Theory in 1936.  Unlike Keynes's other disciples, Champernowne's review was lukewarm, warning that the Keynesian theory might not be as general as all that, that Neoclassical and Keynesian theories might apply in different situations.

In 1937, Champernowne won a prize fellowship at King's College (the submitted treatise, on income distribution, was published only in 1973).  And in 1938, Champernowne became a lecturer in statistics at Cambridge, having grown increasingly interested in the subject, particularly Bayesian analysis, perhaps partly on account of lingering influence of the late Ramsey at Cambridge. 

During the war, Champernowne was employed by the British government's statistical office and then briefly joined Jewkes at the ministry of aircraft production.  After the war, Champernowne took up a position at Oxford, first as director of the Oxford Institute of Statistics, then from 1948, as professor of statistics.  He was a fellow of Nuffield College during this period.

In 1959, Champernowne returned to Cambridge as a reader of economics and fellow of Trinity College, where he would remain for the remainder of his career.  His 1969 trilogy is regarded as the culmination of his work into Bayesian analysis. 

Champernowne is famously credited by the Cambridge Keynesians, notably Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, as a 'behind-the-scenes fixer' of their work, even if he was never quite a subscribing member of their school of thought.

 

  

top1.gif (924 bytes)Top

 

Major Works of David G. Champernowne

  • "The Construction of Decimals Normal in the Scale of Ten", 1933, J of London Mathematical Society
  • "Unemployment, Basic and Monetary: the Classical analysis and the Keynesian", 1936, RES
  • "A Model of Income Distribution", 1953, EJ
  • "The Production Function and the Theory of Capital: A comment", 1953, EJ
  • "The Value of Invested Capital", with R.F. Kahn, 1956, in J. Robinson, Accumulation of Capital.
  • "Expectations and the links between the Economic Future and Present", 1963, in Lekachmen, editor, Keynes's General Theory.
  • Uncertainty and Estimation in Economics, 3 vols., 1969
  • Distribution of Income Between Persons, 1973. - extracts
  • Economic Inequality and Income Distribution, with F.A. Cowell, 1998 - extracts
HET

 
top1.gif (924 bytes)Top

Resources on D.G.Champernowne

 
top1.gif (924 bytes)Top
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca