Biography
He studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest, graduating in 1926. After winning a scholarship, he went on to study at the University of Paris, where his interests turned towards statistics and economics. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1930 for a thesis on latent cyclical components in time series. Another scholarship allowed him to pursue his studies for two years at the University College in London with Karl Pearson. In 1932, Georgescu-Roegen returned to Romania and became Professor of Statistics at the University of Bucharest. He held this position until 1946. He was a professor of economics at Vanderbilt University from 1950 to 1976. He won the university's Harvie Branscomb Distinguished Professor Award in 1961, and in 1971 the American Economic Association named him a Distinguished Fellow.
A principal contribution to economics by Georgescu-Roegen was the concept of entropy from thermodynamics (as distinguished from the mechanistic foundation of neoclassical economics drawn from Newtonian physics), as well as foundational work which later developed into evolutionary economics. His work contributed significantly to bioeconomics and to ecological economics.
He was a protégé of the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter. His own protégés included foundational ecological economist Herman E. Daly and Kozo Mayumi who further extended Georgescu-Roegen’s theories on entropy in the study of energy analysis.
Read more about this topic: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
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