D. G. Champernowne

), a barrister and bursar of Keble College, Oxford, and his wife Isabel Mary, daughter of George Rashleigh, of Riseley, Horton Kirby, Kent.

[5][6] Champernowne was educated at Winchester and King's College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary and friend of Alan Turing.

After academic work there and at the London School of Economics, he was drafted into the statistical section of the prime minister's office at the beginning of the Second World War to supply quantitative information to help Winston Churchill make decisions; then, in 1941, he moved on to become a programme director in the Ministry of Aircraft Production.

[1][2] In 1948, working with his old college friend Alan Turing, he helped develop one of the first chess-playing computer programs, Turochamp.

[9] The book for which he is most renowned, synthesising a life's work, Economic Inequality and Income Distribution (Cambridge University Press), was published in 1998.