Background
David Champernowne was born on July 12, 1912, Oxford, England, the United Kingdom, to Francis Gawayne Champernowne (born Dartington, Devon, 22 April 1866; died 28 May 1921) and Isabel Mary Rashleigh (born 20 August 1884; died 1969).
College St, Winchester SO23 9NA, UK
David Champernowne was educated at Winchester College, a famous independent school for boys founded in the 14th century. This school provided Champernowne with an outstanding education and his favorite subject at school was mathematics.
College St, Winchester SO23 9NA, UK
David Champernowne was educated at Winchester College, a famous independent school for boys founded in the 14th century. This school provided Champernowne with an outstanding education and his favorite subject at school was mathematics.
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK
In 1931 Champernowne won a scholarship to study mathematics at King's College, Cambridge and matriculated in the autumn of that year.
(Economic inequality has become a focus of prime interest ...)
Economic inequality has become a focus of prime interest for economic analysts and policy makers. This book provides an integrated approach to the topics of inequality and personal income distribution. It covers the practical and theoretical bases for inequality analysis and income distribution as well as providing applications to real world problems.
https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Inequality-Income-Distribution-Champernowne/dp/0521589592/?tag=2022091-20
1998
economist mathematician scientist
David Champernowne was born on July 12, 1912, Oxford, England, the United Kingdom, to Francis Gawayne Champernowne (born Dartington, Devon, 22 April 1866; died 28 May 1921) and Isabel Mary Rashleigh (born 20 August 1884; died 1969).
David Champernowne, known to all as Champ, was educated at Winchester College, a famous independent school for boys founded in the 14th century. This school provided Champernowne with an outstanding education and his favorite subject at school was mathematics. In 1931 he won a scholarship to study mathematics at King's College, Cambridge and matriculated in the autumn of that year. However, he was already showing an interest in economics and, in the summer before going to Cambridge, he read Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics.
Champernowne was almost exactly the same age as Alan Turing and the two young students both matriculated at the same time to study the mathematical tripos at King's College, Cambridge. They quickly became life-long friends. Champernowne quickly made his mark as a brilliant mathematician and proved some beautiful results which we will now describe. A real number is normal if, in its representation as a decimal, any arbitrary sequence of digits of length t occurs, in the limit, 1/10t times. For example, in a normal number, each single-digit occurs, in the limit, 1/10 of the time. The sequence 12345 will, in a normal number, occur in the limit 1/105 of the time. Champernowne was the first to give simply constructed normal numbers. The easiest of these to define is the number 0.1234567891011121314151617... which is constructed by concatenating the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, ... after the decimal point. This number is now known as Champernowne's constant and he published a proof that it is normal is a delightful paper submitted to the Journal of the London Mathematical Society in April 1933.
With such a brilliant start to his undergraduate career, one might have expected Champernowne to carve out for himself a career as a top mathematician. However, one of his lecturers at Cambridge was John Maynard Keynes who quickly spotted Champernowne's potential and interest in economics. He was also influenced by the economist Dennis Robertson (1890-1963) who was working closely with Keynes and also teaching at Cambridge. Advised by Keynes, Champernowne completed his mathematics degree in two years and then embarked on a second degree in economics. From October 1934 his work in economics was supervised by Keynes. He ended up with two first-class degrees, one in mathematics and the other in economics.
One has to understand how important new ideas in economics had become around this time. This was a period of unemployment and the Great Depression, which had begun around 1929 in the United States, had hit Great Britain hard from 1930 onwards. Conventional economics could not cope with the extraordinary events which took place leaving traditional economic theory with no answer. Keynes published his most important work, containing the culmination of his ideas, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935-36). Champernowne had already published a number of small articles on economics but his first major work on economics was a review of Keynes's work which he published in the Review of Economic Studies in 1936.
In November 1936 Champernowne submitted his prize fellowship dissertation Distribution of income between persons to King's College, Cambridge.
In 1936, after graduating, Champernowne had been appointed as an assistant lecturer at the London School of Economics. He spent two years in this position before returning to Cambridge in 1938 as a university lecturer in statistics. A year after he took up this position, World War II broke out. In 1940 he was made a temporary Civil Servant and was assigned to the statistical section of the prime minister's office as an assistant to Frederick Alexander Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell (1886-1957). Lindemann was an excellent physicist but he was a strong supporter of eugenics and held the working class, and various minorities, in contempt. He had, at Winston Churchill's request, set up the statistical section known as 'S-Branch' which daily reported directly to Churchill. Champernowne did not find working for Lindemann easy. Lindemann had proposed saturation bombing of working-class areas of German cities and Champernowne showed considerable moral courage to criticize this strategy, both on the grounds that it was not effective and that it was not moral. Champernowne was moved to the Department of Statistics and Programming in the Ministry of Aircraft Production. There he worked under the economist John Jewkes (1902-1988) for the rest of the war.
After the war ended in 1945, Champernowne returned to university positions but not at Cambridge, rather at the University of Oxford where he was appointed as a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was also made the director of the Oxford University Institute of Statistics. In 1948, Champernowne was appointed as a professor of statistics at Oxford. As to his research interests at Oxford, he was mainly interested in applying statistical methods to economics. In 1948 he had published the paper Sampling theory applied to autoregressive sequences in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. This paper represented the first serious attempt at the application to the time-series analysis of the techniques of Thomas Bayes.
In 1970, Champernowne was made a fellow of the British Academy and given a personal chair at Cambridge: he defined his subject area as economics and statistics.
Champernowne's friendship with Alan Turing had continued and, after the war, the two began to investigate writing a computer program to play chess. The program, called Turochamp, was described by Champernowne many years later.
In 1978, Champernowne retired, though he remained an emeritus professor and a fellow of Trinity College. When he fell ill in his final years, he and Mieke moved from Cambridge to Budleigh Salterton, Devon, to be closer to one of his two sons.
(Economic inequality has become a focus of prime interest ...)
1998Champernowne loved hiking, and at the age of 74 managed to fulfill a lifelong ambition by scaling Sca Fell. Another passion was music; he had been in the choir at both Winchester and King's College, Cambridge. Though shy, he was defiant of authority and orthodoxy, and to the end a schoolboy at heart.
Champernowne's grave is at the new church at Dartington in Devon, built by his family in the 1870s to replace the ancient church at Dartington Hall, the family seat.
David Champernowne Wilhelmina Barbara Maria Dullaert, known as Mieke. She was the daughter of Petrus Ludovicus Dullaert and his wife Mevrouw. The Dullaert family were from Zutphen in The Netherlands. David Champernowne married Mieke on 30 March 1948 in Oxford; they had two sons Richard and Arthur.