ABSTRACT
One hundred years ago, in June 1905, a short article entitled Methods of Measuring the Concentration of Wealth appeared in the Publications of the American Statistical Association (the forerunner of the Journal of the American Statistical Association), proposing a simple method, subsequently called the Lorenz curve, for visualizing distributions of income or wealth with respect to their inherent ‘inequality’ or ‘concentration.’ Its author, Max Otto Lorenz, was about to complete his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. This article apparently remained his only publication in a scientific journal, and it made him famous. A short biography of M.O. Lorenz is available in Kleiber and Kotz (2003, pp. 263-265).
