Max Otto Lorenz (/ˈlɒrənts/ LORR-ənts; September 19, 1876 – July 1, 1959) was an American economist who developed the Lorenz curve in an undergraduate essay.
[1] He published a paper on this when he was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
[2] His doctoral thesis (1906) was on 'The Economic Theory of Railroad Rates' and made no reference to perhaps his most famous paper.
He was of German ancestry, his father having been born in Essen in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1841.
In 1917 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.