Vilfredo Pareto

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was born Wilfried Fritz Pareto on 15 July 1848, trained in physics and mathematics, and worked across civil engineering, economics, sociology, political science, and philosophy. He made his mark studying income distribution and individual choice, helping build the Lausanne School of economics and introducing the concept of Pareto efficiency to microeconomics. He was the first to observe that income follows a power law — a Pareto distribution — drawn from his finding that roughly 80% of Italian wealth concentrated in about 20% of the population, the insight that…