Lucien March (6 December 1859 – 4 April 1933) was a French demographer, statistician, and engineer.[1][2][3]

In 1878 Lucien March enrolled in l'École polytechnique and after graduation in 1880[3] served in the naval artillery corps.[1] He was the director of the Statistique générale de la France [fr] (SGF) from 1896 to 1920. In 1896, he introduced Hollerith punched card tabulating machines into France and later invented an improved machine, the classifier-counter-printer, which was used until the 1940s. He also arranged a sorting process using the workplace addresses of the people counted in the French population census to generate valuable economic data and labor statistics.[4]

He was an invited speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rome (1908), Toronto (1924), and Bologna (1928).[5]

In 1912, upon his return from an international congress on eugenics, held in London, March helped to found a French eugenics society, which published in 1922 Eugénique et Sélection, a collection of essays on eugenics.[6][7] In the 1920s he played an important role in the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations.[8]

Selected publications edit

  • "Les représentations graphiques et la statistique comparative". Journal de la société française de statistique (in French). 45: 407–420. 1904. ISSN 1962-5197.
  • "Comparaison numérique de courbes statistiques". Journal de la société française de statistique (in French). 46: 255–277. 1905. ISSN 1962-5197.
  • "Remarques sur la terminologie en statistique". Journal de la société française de statistique (in French). 49: 290–296. 1908. ISSN 1962-5197.
  • March, Lucien (April 1912). "Some Researches Concerning the Factors of Mortality". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 75 (5): 505–538. doi:10.2307/2340112. JSTOR 2340112.
  • Mouvement des prix et des salaires pendant la guerre (in French). Paris: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Presses Universitaires de France. 1925.
  • "Différences et corrélation en statistique". Journal de la société française de statistique (in French). 69: 38–63. 1928. ISSN 1962-5197.
  • La statistique et sa méthode (in French). Paris: Masson et Cie. 1928. OCLC 758285835.
  • Différences et corrélation en statistique (in French). Nancy-Paris: Berger-Levrault. 1928. OCLC 492286219.
  • Les principes de la méthode statistique: avec quelques applications aux sciences naturelles et à la science des affaires (in French). Librairie Félix Alcan. 1930. OCLC 803266166.

References edit

  1. ^ a b Armatte, Michel (2005). "Lucien March (1859-1933): une statistique mathématique sans probabilité?". Journal Électronique d'Histoire des Probabilités et de la Statistique [electronic only]. 1 (1).
  2. ^ Desrosières, Alain (2002). The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674009691; trans. by Camille Naish from La politique des grand nombres: Histoire de la raison statistique (1993){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  3. ^ a b Huber, Michel (1933). "Nécrologie: Lucien March (1859–1933)". Revue d'économie politique. 47 (2): 545–547. JSTOR 24685765.
  4. ^ The Politics of Large Numbers. 2002. p. 158.
  5. ^ March, L. "Note sur la corrélation." In Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici: Bologna del 3 al 10 de settembre di 1928, vol. 6, pp. 133–148. 1929.
  6. ^ The Politics of Large Numbers. 2002. p. 161.
  7. ^ Papenoe, Paul (1 September 1923). "Eugenics in France". Journal of Heredity. 14 (6): 275–276. doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a102339.
  8. ^ Hodson, C. B. S. (1934). "Lucien March: An appreciation". The Eugenics Review. 25 (4): 261. PMC 2985286. PMID 21260113.

External links edit